Friday, February 22, 2013

Yet more on Voegelinians...

http://melissadecarlo.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/gailf548sm1.jpg
-- Prof. Barry Cooper, catching some rays on the deck of the Titanic, and catching up on his Koran.

I've mentioned Barry Cooper, a luminary among Voegelinians, before (here, and especially here).  (As to why I keep harping on this, I have summarized it in one pithy paragraph.) I have not yet read Cooper's book (with its title suspiciously if not inauspiciously smelling of equivalencism), New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism, but I have read his lengthy essay, The Genealogy of Islamic Terrorism (briefly discussed in the second link cited above) on the official Voegelinian website, VoegelinView.  

In that essay, and in a review he wrote of a book by Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, Cooper seems to subscribe to a meme that has become common (if not probably dominant) among PC MC and asymptotic Western analysts -- namely, that Islam only became problematic at a certain point in time (the relative date may vary, but usually it is set in the medieval period), when the "Mutazalite School" lost sway (and, it is asserted with dubious evidence, the "gates of ijtihad slammed shut" as though those gates were ever really open in the first place), steering a supposedly new course for Islam, thus implying that Islam was hunky-dory (if not positively peachy keen) before that point in time.  Thus:

The “traditionalists,” as Reilly called the non-Mutazalites, believed in a lot more than in the uncreated status of the Koran, though that was a central pillar of their position. If eternal God had spoken to humans in the eternal Koran, there was no need for reason because reality and instruction had been finally and completely revealed. This was the fundamental position of the Asharite School founded by Abu Hasan al-Ashari in the early tenth century. In contrast to the Mutazalites, the Asharites emphasized the unlimited will of God, not His reasonableness.

And, the implication is painfully throbbing beneath the surface of all this nonsense:  if Islam was hunky-dory (if not positively peachy keen) before that point in time, it can be so again, if only we can make sure to avoid our innately Western propensity toward bigotry, and if only we can help all those decent Muslims (probably the "vast majority"...?) who so desperately want to be decent and peaceful and abide by a respect for the equality of all minorities!

While this meme seems to be Reilly's main thesis, Cooper's review in turn seems to reflect no problems with it, and effectively endorses it as useful for our purposes of analyzing our present problem of "Islamism".  Only in one place that I could find in Cooper's review does he show a glimmer of a recognition of a way out of the Cave he and so many other Westerners seem to be in on this issue -- in a rhetorical question posed in the very last paragraph.  Referring to that alleged diremption Islam manifested in the medieval period when it made a wrong turn (from, therefore, apparently, a right course), Cooper writes:

...what was it in Islam that made such a perversion possible? 

When, however, he follows that immediately with the claim that --

Robert Reilly raises just that question and provides a clear answer in this splendid book...

-- we are made to wonder what Reilly could possibly say that would so markedly depart from the meme that dominates his book's title; and we are also made to wonder what this mysterious answer is that Reilly provides that Cooper couldn't summarize, by which we could answer that most pressing question, which is really the searingly crucial point of all analysis of the problem of Islam.

Alas, in Cooper's first sentence of that last paragraph --

Most of us can see that Islamism is a perversion of Islam...

-- we see that whatever the answer could be, it cannot for Cooper rise to any substantive condemnation of Islam qua Islam.  He's already stacked the deck.

Which no doubt comes in handy for his day job, re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

10 comments:

Traeh said...

I have read Reilly's excellent book, and I'm pretty sure it nowhere contains a claim that "Islamism" or the like is a perversion of Islam.

Reilly asks early on to what extent the profoundly anti-reason, no-free-will aspect of Islam is rooted in the earliest texts and is not just a result of theology established a thousand years ago. Reilly tentatively answers that while the Qu'ran is somewhat ambiguous as to human free will, the hadith lean against it. In that sense, he seems to favor critics of Islam itself.

My sense is that Reilly tries to leave the doors open to either view -- that Islam became anti-reason and anti-freedom "only" a thousand years ago, or that it has been inherently so from the very beginning. Reilly doesn't come out and say it, but I think he might have wanted to leave the question of Islam's original meaning open because he wanted to leave some space for liberal Muslims, even though a minority, to wage an internal ideological fight within Islam.

Reilly also wanted to accomplish an anatomization of the theological assumptions established within a few centuries of Islam's birth. He does a brilliant job explaining the bizarre implications of that theology.

But how did a liberal Islamic theology emerge among the Mutazalites to begin with? I don't recall Reilly saying anything definitive about this. My guess is that the Muslims were more or less unacquainted with serious philosophical and theological reflection until the Islamic military conquests of vast sweeps of Christian civilization introduced the Muslims to such reflection. Because Muslims' first tutors in serious philosophical and theological reflection were purveyors of Christian and ancient Greek culture, the Muslims initially imbibed an intellectual language imbued with substantial presumptions of human free will and the acceptance of independent reason. But it was just a matter of time until the concepts implicit in Islam's core texts would be made more explicit and would come into conflict with and seek to crush the liberalism of the Greek-Christian world Islam ruled over. Thus the Mutazalites were crushed.

Traeh said...

And, the implication is painfully throbbing beneath the surface of all this nonsense: if Islam was hunky-dory (if not positively peachy keen) before that point in time, it can be so again, if only we can make sure to avoid our innately Western propensity toward bigotry, and if only we can help all those decent Muslims (probably the "vast majority"...?) who so desperately want to be decent and peaceful and abide by a respect for the equality of all minorities!

While this meme seems to be Reilly's main thesis...


I don't think that is an accurate account of Reilly. As I recall, Reilly says in the book that the anti-reason, anti-freedom understanding of Islam is today the mainstream understanding -- not a minority one. And he traces that understanding back at least a thousand years, and does not rule out or treat as improbable that it goes back to Islam's very origins. He suggests the preponderance of hadiths seem to support a totalitarian Islam, while the Qur'an is somewhat more ambiguous.

Hesperado said...

traeh,

How could the Koran be ambiguous at all about supporting totalitarianism?

Hesperado said...



Robert Reilly was interviewed by Spencer back in 2010. Though Spencer gives him glowingly unalloyed treatment, there is a problem with Reilly (basically the same one I identified in my essay above).

Explaining the view of one of the supposedly good factions in early Islam, the Qadarites, Reilly says:

"If men were not able to control their behaviour, said the Qadarites, the moral obligation to do good and avoid evil, enjoined by the Qur'an, would be meaningless. "

So just because the Qadarites believed in free will to choose to do what the Koran enjoins, that makes them less of a problem to the human race than the Muslims who decided there was no free will?

About his book, Reilly answers elsewhere:

"...the book attempts to relate not so much how it happened, but why it happened; what its devastating consequences have been, and how the Muslim mind might possibly be reopened (as suggested by Muslims themselves), an endeavor fraught with repercussions for the West, as well as for the Islamic world."

This project he advocates is not only a grievous waste of time, it is profoundly reckless, for it will bring in its train various wedges by which Muslims will remain and/or continue to immigrate, as well as ways for Muslims to appear moderate by saying the right things (while we continue to bend over backwards to give benefit of the doubt to those who seem "a bit slow" to learn). Any project calculated to help Muslims is bound to do this -- unless conducted with a strictly Colonialist mindset; or perhaps a better analogy would be helping wild hyenas, where precautions are taken and no one would ever think that they have to live amongst us to be helped. Even then, it's a gamble and probably a colossal waste of time.

Reilly basically has way too much optimism about the "Inner Westerner" potentially inside every Muslim -- and not enough grimly sober appreciation for how utterly unlike us Muslims are.

Hesperado said...

Looking at the JW comments to that 2010 interview, I found this nicely worded one expressing similar misgivings:

But I take issue with Robert Reilly's " the prescription for recovery would be its re-hellenization..."

"How could Mr. Reilly even suggest such a foolhardy effort?

"Islam can only be dumped and dumped totally by any sane person. A re-hellenization would only elevate something that's profoundly stupid to something pathetically stupid with torturous mental gymnastics endeavoring to create coherence from what clearly was only a clumsy concoction out of the head of a brutal 7th century con man. "

Anonymous said...

"'If men were not able to control their behaviour, said the Qadarites, the moral obligation to do good and avoid evil, enjoined by the Qur'an, would be meaningless.'"

The problem is wholly different than that of free will.

The problem a definitional problem whereby Islam defines evil as good and good as evil.

What good is it so say that free will exists to commit good when violently cutting off a young girl's clitoris is seriously considered to be good?

What good is it so say that free will exists to commit good when 'marrying' a six year old girl (possibly a five year old girl by the lunar calendar) is seriously considered to be good?

What good is it so say that free will exists to commit good when 'marrying' four wives at a time (or more than four wives over time via easy male divorce under Sharia Law) is seriously considered to be good?

Etc. ad infinitum.

Egghead

Hesperado said...

The deeper I go into Reilly, the warier, and wearier, I get.

Toward the end of the second interview (not the Spencer one, but one conducted by The Daily Caller also in 2010), he's asked for a list of hopeful Muslim names, and he comes up with many. Among them, Abdurrahman Wahid.

http://dailycaller.com/2010/08/20/10-questions-with-the-closing-of-the-muslim-mind-author-robert-r-reilly/4/

That name sounded familiar, so I Googled, and sure enough found Spencer (in 2005) dissect his Wall Street Journal piece that basically was a puff piece promoting the Tiny MInority of Extremists meme.

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/12/a-few-reflections-on-wahids-right-islam-vs-wrong-islam.html

In the comments, Hugh Fitzgerald weighed in, arguing that while Wahid seemed to be genuinely groping for reform, he was deeply mentally confused, and that for that reason and others, it would be reckless for us to go down a road of facilitating and helping such a paltry number of already metnally compromised "reformers":

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/12/a-few-reflections-on-wahids-right-islam-vs-wrong-islam.html

But in a world of unwary Infidels, that does harm. In a world where Europe may be islamized, and find not that it has tens of millions of Walids on its hands, but ten thousand Walids, and thirty or forty or one hundred million Muslims of the kind who believe what Muslims in Iran, or Pakistan, or Saudi Arabai, or Iraq, or Syria, or Algeria, believe -- and even if the ratio is wrong, even if Walid were representative of more than a handful, even if he represented, say, 20% of the world's Muslims, that would hardly be enough to justify the risk that Europe, and other Infidel states, are now taking -- by not yet stopping all Muslim immigration, and making efforts to create, in their own countries, by refusing to give an inch on Muslm demands for changes in the laws, customs, manners, mores of the indigenous Infidels, to construct only for the purposes of legiitimate civilizational self-defense, an environment that is Islam-hostile rather than, as at present, so very Islam-friendly, with its tip-toeing around every conceivable problem and outrageous demand and, in France and elsewhere, intolerable behavior.

But Wahid represents, for Reilly, the hope for the world and the West.

That's so 2003.

Hesperado said...



Thanks Egghead for adding what I only implicitly conveyed:

The problem a definitional problem whereby Islam defines evil as good and good as evil.

What good is it so say that free will exists to commit good when violently cutting off a young girl's clitoris is seriously considered to be good?

I suppose Reilly (and perhaps traeh) think that over a long period of time of being open to free will, Muslims would "evolve" into more and more questioning of their Islamic morals. That might have been a luxury we could have afforded to indulge say in 1700 (particularly as we had the upper hand and were embarking upon Colonialism) -- though even in that circumstance it would have been extraordinarily arduous and dicey. But now, when the centuries have become radically foreshortened to decades -- at best, as Islam is becoming morefanatical, not less, all around the world -- we no longer have that luxury.

One of the worst things a person can do is take ploddingly deliberate measures at a time when an emergency is a-brewing; this being sort of the mirror-image of the opposite error -- impulsively and impetuously reaching for the quick fix when you misculaculate your situation as being more of an emergency than it really is.

If it weren't for the real and present (and ongoing future) danger of terrorism utilizing weapons of mass destruction -- facilitated by increasing networks of millions of Muslims within the West, not just as taxi drivers and 711 clerks, but more often woven into the fabric of our societies in all kinds of institutions and positions -- I wouldn't be unwilling to consider that error #2 describes our situation. The reasonably inferred presence of that danger, however, forces us to assume error #1; and to try our best to rectify it. Letting the likes of Reilly guide us would be inimical to what we need, and what our safety deserves.

Anonymous said...

I wish that I could go back and edit that last comment:

"'If men were not able to control their behaviour, said the Qadarites, the moral obligation to do good and avoid evil, enjoined by the Qur'an, would be meaningless.'"

The problem is wholly different than that of free will.

The problem is a definitional problem whereby Islam defines evil as good and good as evil.

What good is it to say that free will exists to commit good when violently cutting off a young girl's clitoris is seriously considered to be good?

What good is it to say that free will exists to commit good when 'marrying' a six year old girl (possibly a five year old girl by the lunar calendar) is seriously considered to be good?

What good is it to say that free will exists to commit good when 'marrying' four wives at a time (or more than four wives over time via easy male divorce under Sharia Law) is seriously considered to be good?

Etc. ad infinitum.

Egghead

3:50 PM

Hesperado said...

At that comments thread for the 2010 interview with Reilly, a JW regular posted a particularly damning collection of information about Wahid:

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/12/a-few-reflections-on-wahids-right-islam-vs-wrong-islam.html#comment-149767

Reading through that information, it becomes clear that Wahid even pulled the wool over Hugh's eyes (who gave him the benefit of the doubt as being mentally confused, but reform minded).

Shame on Reilly for being so gullible.