True Islam

The title of today's Strib editorial demands that we "Stop Caricaturing Islam?

It should go without saying that the Strib Editorial Board should heed its own advice.

Why, we are led to wonder, does the world conspire so tirelessly to make an honest appreciation of Islam impossible? Now it's Pope Benedict XVI and Islamic hotheads who are doing their best to malign one of the world's great religions.

Benedict, hotheads. Hotheads, Benedict.

How is it that the Strib finds moral equivalence between the two?

The pope started it during a speech at the University of Regensburg in Germany, where he once was on the faculty. His speech was a reflection on the place of reason in Christianity.

To set up the speech (as in, "I was reminded of this recently by ..."), he used a quotation from a 14th-century Byzantine emperor. The emperor, peeved at a long-running Ottoman siege of Constantinople (unsuccessful), lectured his Persian correspondent at one point that the prophet Mohammed's teachings offered "things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

Benedict's was an ill-fitting, gratuitous slap at Islam dressed up as an entry point for a lecture on reason.

Huh?

Have you read the Pope's speech?

To force a faith on someone by threat of violence is to abnegate reason (as well as deeply, intensely immoral by any rational measure). Forget the specific faiths for a moment; if any fraction of the Mormon or Methodist churches were to elicit conversions - any conversions - at gunpoint, do you think the Strib would be so accomodating?

Islam is entirely absent from the remainder of his address. He might have chosen dozens of more apt and less inflammatory points of departure; this appears to have been deliberate provocation.

Yes, but he didn't. He made a point - one that a reasonable person might disagree with (even if it's the Pope; we had a Reformation over that sort of thing, once upon a time).

Of course, "reasonable people" aren't the issue, here:

Whereupon some Islamic hotheads took to burning buildings, attacking people and, in a now tiresome, worn tirade, pledging to convert every human being to Islam or lop off their heads. Someone should sit the hotheads down, read them a few of the outrageous statements individual Muslim leaders have made in recent years about Christianity or Judaism ... and suggest they gauge the relative heat of the pope's words. They need also to see the idiocy of responding to accusations of Islamic violence with, well, threats of Islamic violence.

[slap head]

EUREKA!

That's it!

One wonders, sometimes, if the Strib misses the real lesson on purpose:

If God, Allah, Adonai were a schoolteacher, he'd send Pope Benedict to one corner and the hotheads to another. Then he'd lecture on the real Islam. Perhaps he'd use Ulug'bek as an example. Ulug'bek was a 15th century Afghan prince and one of the world's great astronomers. He believed passionately in knowledge and built wonderful madrassahs open to both men and women (you can find a photo gallery of perhaps the greatest of his madrassahs, Samarkand's exquisite Registan, online at www.startribune.com/opinion).

Unfortunately, his passion was his undoing: Ulug'bek was assassinated in 1449 by Muslim extremists who took issue with his love of math and science. But then, and now, he represents true Islam.

Really?

Because then, as now, you have an example of a reasonable Moslem man being murdered by extremist reactionary thugs You don't have to go back to the fifteenth century to find this pattern, either. It's as recent as today's headlines.

In the 1920's, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem - who went on to become a friend of Hitler - was concerned about the number of Jews migrating to Palestine. He embarked on a campaign of intimidating and killing...

...moderate, accomodationist Moslems. Because to the Moslem extremist, it's the accomodationist and the moderate and the "man of reason" that is the first obstacle. And so today in much of the Palestinian and Lebanese worlds, the "moderate" factions...live in America. Because back where they come from, the "moderate" Moslems get roughed up, disenfranchised, murdered.

People like Ulug'bek, getting just what Ulug'bek got.

Posted by Mitch at September 20, 2006 07:24 AM | TrackBack