The Sept. 11 Canon: Week 1
Dear Chris and Ted,
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StumbleUponYou guys have nobler souls than I do because I can't find a single nice thing to say about Armstrong's Islam. Well, no, I take that back: I am pleased to report that for the most part the book is a bore because at the end, it turns into a menace. But luckily no one's ever going to get that far, unless (like us) they've been paid to.
To break the book's badness into parts: The first 138 pages is a term-paperish assemblage of undigested political and military facts, artlessly and uninformatively strung together, leavened by the occasional astute observation about Islamic theology. I'm guessing that Armstrong has never studied history. The only thing the blurbs tell you is that she spent seven years in a convent, and I'd bet she supplemented that experience with formal training in religion and maybe literature, but not history. I say this not to be a snob (I mean, I am a snob, but that's only partly relevant here) but because she seems ignorant of all the fabulous literary tools the discipline puts in the hands of writers these days, even writers writing little introductions to big subjects.
Let's indulge in one of those deeply unfair reviewers' exercises and imagine what could have been. Using the techniques of social and material history, Armstrong could have broken up the monotony with short, elegant interludes on life as it was lived by ordinary Muslims during the glory days of Islamic empire. She could have filtered its disintegration through comparative theories of warfare, explaining the supremacy of this weapon over that one or this structure of decision-making over some other one. Even in the one area she relentlessly insists upon—political history—she could have been less naive.
Chris notes the scary theme running through her book: that the history of Islam is that of one benighted effort after another to construct "an ideal form of Muslim government." Why have these attempts always failed? Armstrong, never squarely addressing the question, never gives us an answer. Bernard Lewis, in The Middle East, dissects the problem handily. He shows that Islam's long-standing obsession with religious purity and authenticity (battles over this started in Mohammed's lifetime and continue to this day), combined with its ingrained distrust of higher authorities (the desert tribes from which Islam sprang instinctively hated centralization) makes governing the Muslim polity an exceedingly difficult task. Every time a workable system arises, some sect feels compelled to secede. Religious leaders who collaborate with political leaders are automatically suspected of corruption, so they steer clear of positions of responsibility that would moderate their theological fervor.
Armstrong hints at this problem when she writes: "The Shariah [Islamic law] had begun as a protest movement, and much of its dynamism derived from its oppositional stance." Trying to hold a bunch of oppositionalists together leads inevitably to frustration and authoritarianism and ultimately anarchy. Islamic governments tend only to cohere when they can unite their people against an external enemy, which gives us new insight into the importance of jihad as a religious and political concept.
Like Chris, I'm kept up at night by this stuff. All religions have these problems to some degree, but as Chris points out, Islam's emphasis on holy war and politics as a religious enterprise makes the Muslims' seem much more threatening.
Armstrong certainly doesn't provide solace. In the last 49 pages of her book, the part in which she becomes a menace, she also becomes interesting, in a horrifying way. She delivers a series of apologetics for Islam and its well-meaning, long-suffering way of life, in the process inadvertently providing great insight into Arab self-pity. Have Arab nations never had a successful experience of democracy? That turns out to be the Western powers' fault because they tainted the model with colonialism. (Lewis points out that that the Arabs have at least one reason to be grateful toward
The passage that made me hoot, though, was this one, in which she appears to flirt with becoming a publicist for Bin Laden. (Admittedly she wrote this last year, when terrorists had tried and failed to blow up the
I'm sorry, but I just can't summon up the requisite degree of sympathy.
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Notes From The Fray Editor:
Jamal Thalji calls for books by Arabic authors. ADAS says that "the charge of excessive attention to 'politics' is thrown at all established religions…[and] is, of course, usually true…To say that Islam's success is knotted to its politics is just to say that it was successful." BML looks at Islamic history here, while Uno Who is reading Tom Clancy, and wondering who else is.
Comments:
Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult, tried to use biological agents in a terror attack in some of Japan's most densely populated cities. The cult's membership included technicians and other people with graduate-school-level training in biochemistry, biology, etc. They were nonetheless unable to deliver their weapons, so they opted instead for sarin gas (which they also basically botched).
While I do believe that some of the biowar doomsday scenarios are plausible and worth taking extreme measures to guard against, I also think that it is perhaps more difficult to deliver these weapons than is popularly portrayed. During World War I, one of the earliest uses of chemical weapons backfired heavily when the wind shifted and the chlorine gas blew back toward the Germans.
Finally, I think that a suicide "bio-bomber" may be less of a threat than a hijacker for psychological and religious reasons. Dying in an instant of fire is a much more "religiously" appealing way to go. Dying slowly of a self-induced plague doesn't seem quite so, well, glamorous, and probably not as impressive to God.
--Ananda Gupta
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
The U.S. abandoned its biological warfare program because of its difficulty in use as a controllable weapons system and as a public relations exercise to improve the U.S.'s image during the Vietnam War. Nixon said at the time that he was unconcerned about the U.S. not having such weapons systems since they would nuke anyone that used such weapons against the U.S. During the Gulf War the U.S. government warned Iraq that it would retaliate massively (the implication being the use of nuclear weapons) if the Iraqis used chemical or biological weapons.
The tragedy of U.S. policy is that they have spent a tremendous amount of money on weapons systems for wars which it will probably never fight, but did so little to protect Americans from much more likely terrorist scenarios including biological terrorism. There are many clever, sophisticated, well-funded and ruthless people in the world who can and will develop the technology to use these weapons. New Missile Defense is a complete waste of money since it is beyond belief that any government will ever launch these weapons against the U.S., but horrific bio-terrorism is almost a certainty in the future.
--Martin Kannengieser
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
(11/8)