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"...While
Islam is trying to break away from... rigidity, which
has served it so poorly for several centuries, we are
embracing it.
While Islam is
trying to reclaim the values and ideals of enlightenment
on its own terms, we seem to be abandoning those values
and closing our own gates of ijtihad.* While Islam is
paying the price of fundamentalism and suffering to get
away from it, we elect it and put our trust in it. Two
separate worlds, two separate battles. But how ironic
what they both have in common is the language of
enlightenment: They long to speak it again over there,
even if they have a very long way to go, while it's
becoming more and more of a foreign language over here.
The great Judge Learned Hand once defined the spirit of
liberty as "the spirit which is not too sure that it is
right." We've lost that spirit of liberty, which is not
too sure that it is right, and replaced it with a dogma
of liberty and self-righteous certainties. Maybe that'll
help us win a few wars: The war on terror, the war in
Iraq, maybe even the war on drugs and the war on the
poor. *But those aren't wars worth winning if we're
destroying the meaning of America along the way..."*
Pierre Tristam
November 28, 2005
Daytona Beach News Journal
THE CHALLENGE AND THE
FEAR OF BECOMING ENLIGHTENED
By Pierre Tristam
Since Sept. 11, we've been living under a "clash of
civilizations"
doctrine that can be summed up this way: Over there,
dogma, orthodoxy,
Islam; over here, democracy, pluralism, Constitution.
Over there, dark
continents, dark ages, terrorism; over here, enlightened
West,
enlightenment, freedom.
The doctrine has been used to justify two wars (so far)
and a wholesale
shift in the way the United States deploys its aims
abroad and projects
them at home. The doctrine draws its power from the
language of freedom
-- the language of enlightenment -- both in the way
we've gone about
defining ourselves as a culture and in the way we've
gone about
defending our right to fight the war on terror on our
terms, but on
other people's turfs.
The doctrine is fatally flawed, and its consequences are
lethal, both to
American principles at home and to American interests
abroad. There's no
connection between the language we're using in defining
ourselves and
the reality being imposed at home and abroad. The
language itself has
become the mask of its very opposite. If you want
absolutes, if you want
black and white, if you want orthodoxy, look no further
than the way
American culture politically and legally has been
evolving in the past
several years.
That's not to say that those orthodoxies don't exist in
the Muslim
world. They do in spades. But the enlightenment ideal is
not under
attack from outside our culture. It is under attack from
within it, in a
context that increasingly fears pluralism, scorns
dissent and erodes
democracy. The very ideas of rational, critical
thinking, of progress by
way of challenging assumptions, is being replaced by a
faith-based
approach in policy-making and a fundamentalist approach
in legal
thinking (what some people call originalism) that is
diametrically
opposed to the ideals of enlightenment. If a battle for
freedom is being
waged, it is being waged on the wrong front.
ISLAM'S TOLERANCE
First, a look at Islam as a world supposedly so
incapable of solving its
crises that only western intervention can help. We
should be honest.
Islamdom doesn't have a good reputation these days, and
it brings a lot
of the trouble on itself. But any religion in the wrong
hands, beginning
with Americans' own Christian creeds, can be violent,
backward and evil.
It so happens that few religions can lay claim to as
much beauty of
spirit, art, enlightenment and advancement of the human
race as Islam
did for the entirety of the Middle Ages, when nothing in
Europe could
hold a candle to Islamic civilization, when Islam was
enlightenment
before enlightenment was cool.
What was unique about Islam's early and middle period
was its great
tolerance for people of other faiths, its love and
wealth of learning,
its antipathy for dogma, its realization of pluralism --
in the great
Abassid caliphates of Baghdad from the 9th to the 12th
centuries, in
Spain during the same period, in India during the 16th
and early part of
the 17th centuries. It's possible to see the Muslim
Enlightenment
literally as bookends, in time and geography, with
Baghdad in the early
period and the reign of Akbar the Great in the 16th and
17th centuries
in India, who lived up to a famous verse in the Koran
that speaks for
all the potential pluralism in Islam: "There can be no
compulsion in
religion: Truth stands out clear from error" (which is
actually a
retelling of what Jesus said to his followers: "The
truth will make you
free.")
Akbar's enlightened reign in India coincided with
Europe's bloodiest age
of religious bigotry and warfare, when the Inquisition
was murdering
Jews in Spain and Catholics and Protestants were
murdering each other
everywhere else, when beheadings were the preferred
method of Calvinists
in sleepy Geneva for adulterous men, when Europe was to
know nine wars
of religion in three decades in a warm-up to the
massacres and
holocausts of the 17th century. The roads of religious
intolerance are
paved with the bones of that occasional oxymoron we know
of as western
civilization. And those same roads are conveniently
forgotten by those
who would point to a place like the Middle East and say
things like,
"Those people have been at each other's throats for
ever." Not quite
true. Any notion that the Enlightenment was a western
invention, or that
barbarism is an eastern specialty, is a bit misguided.
But it is also true that everything is not relative. The
Middle East
today and much of the Islamic world is not a comfortable
place to be. It
is often not a defensible place. A United Nations report
on Arab
development noted that the 22 countries that form the
Arab world
translate about 330 books annually, one-fifth of the
number that Greece
alone translates. The cumulative total of translated
books since 9th
century Baghdad is about 100,000, almost the average
that Spain
translates in a single year. What that world needs is a
dose of its own
past enlightenment. So it's a fair question: If Islam
showed not only
the potential but the reality of enlightenment over its
history, why not
now, and why shouldn't the West be showing the way back
to enlightenment?
Aside from the obvious fact that enlightenment doesn't
spring from the
belly of a B-52, because what's going on now in the
Islamic world is
exactly what should be going on: A reformation as
momentous and violent
as Europe's reformation was 500 years ago. Islam is
trying to reinvent
itself. It is looking for a way out of its morass. The
forces of reform
and the reactionary forces of fundamentalism are
literally at each
other's throats, the way Catholics and Protestants, and
eventually
religion and secularism, were at each other's throats in
Europe between
the 16th and 18th centuries.
It's not black and white. The camps aren't neatly
divided between
progressives and reformers. Nor is the presumption true
that the
moderates are looking to adopt Western ways. The
struggle is within
Islam, for a solution for Islam, not to please the West,
look like the
West or get closer to the West. Who will win in Islam is
anybody's
guess. Any way you look at it -- in Iran, Pakistan,
Palestine, Iraq and
Lebanon -- where you have elections, the moderates are
losing big at the
moment. But at the same time it's also true, as the
Iranian scholar of
Islam Reza Aslan argues in a new book on Islam's
evolution, "the vast
majority of the more than one billion Muslims in the
world today readily
accept the fundamental principles of democracy." It just
isn't
American-style democracy they necessarily want or need.
So far as the West is concerned, this, as Aslan argues,
is the most
important lesson to learn: We are bystanders in this
battle within
Islam. We are not players. We are not wanted as players.
We should not
so arrogantly pretend to be players, or to think we have
the right or
the means to be players. How can we even think something
like that with
Sept. 11 behind us? Because the Sept. 11 attacks were
not a declaration
of war on the West, the way the lock and load warriors
in the neo-con
brigades like to see them.
The attacks were part of that "internal conflict between
Muslims," and
they made us, in Aslan's words, "an unwary yet complicit
casualty of a
rivalry that is raging in Islam over who will write the
next chapter in
its story."
Let's not play into the hands of the fanatics, or
confuse the
spectacular with the successful. The best we can do is
what Islam did in
its glory period of conquests: Show the light by
example. Live up to our
own enlightenment ideals.
What we are doing instead is the very opposite. Through
such things as
Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, the secret prisons around
the world called
black sites, the bloody occupation of Iraq and the
seemingly endless
occupation of Afghanistan, we are only proving to the
Islamic world that
the secular West is diseased, that the Crusades, the
Colonial period and
the broken promises of the post-colonial 20th century
were not a fluke
but a pattern.
In Islam's eyes, the West, the secular West especially,
doesn't save. It
mucks up. As long as the United States insists on
crusading for freedom
in Islam's lands, it will be retarding the more
enlightened movements
for reform there.
For all his good intentions, George W. Bush has been
fundamentalist
Islam's best friend, and has probably set back the
progress of Islamic
Enlightenment for many, many years.
Osama bin Laden might as well pray facing the White
House every day,
because without this White House playing right into
fundamentalist
Islam's recruiting drives, Osama might well have been
nothing more than
a bag of bones attached to a dialysis machine by now,
and the tyrannical
Arab world might well have been on its way to following
in the steps of
the Soviet Union's disintegration at the end of the
1980s. Instead, we
have a disintegration of our own to worry about.
DUAL TRANSFORMATIONS
The world of Islam is going through a great reformation.
But in some
ways, so is the United States. The world of Islam is
divided between the
forces of modernity and the reaction of fundamentalism.
But so is the
United States, and I don't mean just because
evangelicals are pulling a
few political strings.
The Islamic world is trying to redefine its identity,
with the Koran in
the center of the battle. But so is the United States,
with the
Constitution, which has always been synonymous with
American identity,
at the heart of the battle -- and the Bible trying to
make its way back
in there. So what we have between East and West are two
distinct
struggles for identity. We delude ourselves into
thinking either side
can affect outcomes in the other. The irony is that
while the president
is warning us about this ragtag bunch of Islamic nut
cases trying to
"destroy our way of life," we're being distracted from a
very serious
struggle happening right here that is changing our way
of life.
The more we talk about doing battle for liberty in the
world, the more
we are losing it at home by not paying attention to
what's happening at
home. The more we continue to ignore that the country is
in the middle
of its own identity crisis, the more the forces of
reaction and
fundamentalism can redefine the political climate their
way, not even by
stealth, but by using the language of enlightenment as a
Trojan horse:
Trust us. We are doing this for freedom's sake. We are
"the light of the
world," and "whoever follows (us) will never walk in
darkness." That's a
quote from the Gospel according to John of course, but
it's also a
visual quote from Bush's campaign ads in 2004, if you
remember the
famous "wolves" commercial that warns of "an
increasingly dangerous
world" and shows a bunch of wolves ready to attack -- if
you don't vote
for the Bush-Cheney ticket.
Seventy-two years ago Franklin Roosevelt told us the
only thing we have
to fear is fear itself. These days we're told the only
thing we have to
fear is safety. The state of fear is our friend.
Perpetual war is our
condition in whose name anything goes. And all the
while, freedom is
being redefined as an instrument of state rather than an
individual
pursuit guaranteed by state protection.
That sounds strangely familiar. The fundamentalists and
the
reactionaries in the Islamic world, are looking to
impose a regressive,
power-centered society of control and submission. But
what the
reactionaries are doing in the United States isn't that
ideologically
different. We are replacing the notion of an
enlightened, progressive
society with the notion of a defensive, reactionary
society.
ACTIVE LIBERTY
If you look at the U.S. Supreme Court, you can actually
see that battle
like a spectator at ringside. In one corner, you have
Justice Antonin
Scalia, believer in God, the death penalty and
originalism, in that order.
In another corner, you have Justice Stephen Breyer,
advocate of what he
calls "the Living Constitution," or "Active Liberty,"
which is actually
the name of the book he's just written to define what he
means, and to
answer the book Scalia published a few years ago to mark
his territory.
Breyer believes the framers didn't write the
Constitution as a static
document to reflect their time only. They wrote it
generally enough to
apply universally in the service of two pragmatic goals:
To protect
liberty and to expand democracy and the ability of
people to participate
in democracy. "They wrote a Constitution that begins
with the words, 'We
the People.' The words are not 'we the people of 1787.'
"
Scalia would disagree totally about the idea that the
Constitution was
an engine of democratic nation-building. He believes in
the
fundamentalist principle that what words say are what
they meant at the
time when they were written. "The text is the law, and
it is the text
that must be observed," he says.
Breyer wants the Constitution to reflect the world of
2005. Scalia wants
the Constitution to stick to the meanings of 1787.
Scalia thinks Breyer's approach is blasphemous. He calls
it
"dice-loading," or smuggling new rights that aren't in
the original
text. Breyer thinks Scalia's approach is "wooden," or
that it operates
"in a vacuum," whereas "in the real world, institutions
and methods of
interpretation must be . . . capable of translating the
people's will
into sound policies."
So who's right? What you have here is not a failure to
communicate. What
you have are two radically different views of the
purpose of both
democracy and the Constitution.
Breyer believes in enlightenment's principle of
progress. He thinks
human beings are perfectible and democracy, guided by
the Constitution,
is that road to progress. Do we want to be a progressive
society or do
we not? For Breyer, the language of the Constitution
answers the
question in a big, enlightened Yes. He would agree with
former Chief
Justice Earl Warren, who said in a 1958 opinion that the
Eighth
Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishments "must
draw its meaning
from the evolving standards of decency that mark the
progress of a
maturing society." Breyer would interpret the entire
Constitution
according to those standards, and he's not afraid to
look abroad for
ideas about who's maturing more brightly.
Scalia is radically opposed to that view. "I detest that
phrase," he
said this year about the Earl Warren opinion. "I'm
afraid that societies
don't always mature. Sometimes they rot." So if the
notion of progress
is not written into the Constitution, he doesn't want to
hear about it.
In Scalia's view, the question of whether we want to be
a progressive
society is itself unconstitutional. If the death penalty
was allowed in
the 18th century, it should be allowed now. If it was
allowed for
juveniles and for mentally retarded people, and it was,
it should be
allowed now, because the framers couldn't possibly have
had capital
punishment in mind when they proscribed "cruel and
unusual" punishment.
If you follow that sort of thinking, then if Florida
wants to bring back
branding, mutilation and banishment of criminals, it
should be OK
because it was so common in the late 18th century even
Thomas Jefferson
advocated it. And if Jefferson didn't think that sort of
barbarism
wasn't cruel or unusual back then, does that mean it's
OK now? Scalia
puts it this way: Maybe it's not OK. But the
Constitution does not ban
it. Scalia's thinking shows how reasoning metastasizes
into dogma.
GATES OF IJTIHAD
The parallel is striking. As Islam began its decline
several centuries
ago the clerics in Islamic law had the very same
debates. They had
something called "the gates of ijtihad," which is the
Arabic word for
"independent reasoning." It was the notion of applying
Islamic law to
contemporary circumstances.
Beginning in the 14th century, Sunni clerics declared
the "gates of
ijtihad" closed. Scholars and jurists from then on were
to rely only on
the original meaning of the Koran, and the legal
reasoning's of the
original clerics closest to the prophet Muhammad. Where
some forms of
Sufism believed all religions were valid, by the 14th
century the
hard-liners in Islam were circling the wagons against
other traditions.
Foreigners became suspect, Islam closed ranks and
decline began.
Word for word, that form of originalism is the Scalia
philosophy, and it
is gaining ground not only on the Supreme Court, but
also in the
unilateralist attitude of the United States as a whole.
That explains
why we are becoming a harsher, meaner, nastier society
than we ought to
be and why we're not exactly in a position to be
preaching democracy and
enlightenment to the rest of the world right now.
While Islam is trying to break away from that rigidity,
which has served
it so poorly for several centuries, we are embracing it.
While Islam is
trying to reclaim the values and ideals of enlightenment
on its own
terms, we seem to be abandoning those values and closing
our own gates
of ijtihad. While Islam is paying the price of
fundamentalism and
suffering to get away from it, we elect it and put our
trust in it. Two
separate worlds, two separate battles. But how ironic
what they both
have in common is the language of enlightenment: They
long to speak it
again over there, even if they have a very long way to
go, while it's
becoming more and more of a foreign language over here.
The great Judge Learned Hand once defined the spirit of
liberty as "the
spirit which is not too sure that it is right." We've
lost that spirit
of liberty, which is not too sure that it is right, and
replaced it with
a dogma of liberty and self-righteous certainties. Maybe
that'll help us
win a few wars: The war on terror, the war in Iraq,
maybe even the war
on drugs and the war on the poor. But those aren't wars
worth winning if
we're destroying the meaning of America along the way.
[Pierre Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. The
essay is adapted
from "The Language of Enlightenment," a lecture
presented Nov. 14 as
part of Stetson University's Values Council Lecture
Series. The complete
text is available at
www.pierretristam.com]
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