Last week I saw something quite rare on network television, an honest-to-goodness debate over religious extremism. The debate originally occurred on Bill Maher's cable TV show. With him were actor Ben Affleck and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, and writer Sam Harris. Maher and Harris were arguing for the proposition that Islamic communities all too often tolerate religious extremists within their ranks who cause untold misery both within their communities, and to those who may encounter in the outside world who do not believe as they do. Their general proposition seems to be that Islam as a religion contains profoundly ill-liberal elements that put it on a collision course with other communities of faith around the world; and secondarily, that the vast majority of Muslims hold strongly to those tenets of their faith that when put into action are likely to cause death or injury to great numbers of people who otherwise cause them no harm.
Harris' point was that some way needs to be found to moderate those doctrines, whether through a process of reinterpretation of ancient texts, or otherwise, so that Muslims can live in peace with others in a multicultural world. What was not stated is that social, political, and religious upheaval are synergistic, and that the Muslim world, largely within the Middle East, is undergoing profound changes, with multiple and interlocking threats to the ways in which life has gone on there for millennia.
I understand the point that the dissenters, Ben Affleck and Nicholas Kristof, were attempting to make, i.e., that it is inherently self-defeating and wrong to stigmatize an entire religion for the abuses of a few. Most Americans would tend to agree with that general proposition.
For his part, Sam Harris set off a firestorm with his comment that Islam is, in his words, "the Motherload of bad ideas". That sort of comment is not going to win him any converts to his way of thinking. On the other hand, he, Bill Maher, and others rightly point out that for far too long Muslim communities have been far too tolerant of their extremist elements, and who justify their horrific actions in the name of Islam.
What was most interesting about that debate, and which Lawrence O'Donnell took time on his show to point out, was that the debaters generally agreed on critical points, that Muslim communities all too often provided support for their extremist elements, but why that was so was never really addressed. Ironically, the Ottoman Empire was generally known for its diversity and tolerance, even as Islam retained its primacy among the religious beliefs that existed within the empire. Externally, the Ottomans made war on Christendom, but that was mostly about controlling people, territory, and wealth. Within that empire, for the most part it was live and let live, with nonbelievers paying special taxes, and perhaps being subjected to certain civic disabilities, but nothing that really didn't happen elsewhere in the world.
All that was made possible because until the end of the 17th century and on into the 18th century, the Muslim world held its own against Christian Europe, most particularly in southeastern Europe and the Balkans. That began to change, beginning with the European Enlightenment, with its emphasis on science and knowledge untainted by religious disbelief, and culminating in the Industrial Revolution, which in its essence, acted as a force multiplier, both in domestic industry, agriculture, and most particularly, in military power. When armaments the Ottomans had they generally had to import from elsewhere, and that was a fatal weakness. What postponed the empire's eventual collapse was not its military strength; rather, it was the internal rivalries within Christendom, chiefly among Russia, Great Britain, France, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Nonetheless, the 19th century saw a steady decline, as former Christian lands rebelled against their Muslim rulers, revolts that largely succeeded with the aid of European powers. The social disorder that followed the collapse of the Ottoman regime was a direct consequence of the empire's inability to defend itself against outside attack.
We see the same sort of thing going on today. The Middle East was carved up into administrative districts bearing no relationship to the people who actually live there. And this occurred during World War I. Over the next century, little if anything, improved; and when oil was discovered in the Middle East during the 1930s, the region essentially lost any hope for governing its own future in traditional ways that would be familiar to anyone living there.
Consequently, one could successfully argue that Islamic doctrine notwithstanding, Muslim communities' willingness to tolerate religious extremism within their ranks is really a reflection of their own poor opinion of themselves within the context of the modern world. Unlike in the West, where world-class universities mediated the tensions between science and religion and secular values versus those spiritual, the universities of the Middle East are now seen by many as places where radicals can unite against Western domination.
Regrettably, the debate that I saw contained nothing of that, and the idea that Muslim communities would willingly become something equivalent to congregants at prestigious Protestant churches carries with it more than a whiff of cultural triumphalism that I find distasteful. It also requires a level of trust and sense of decency among all segments of the community that so far has not been in evidence.
The debate itself, and Lawrence's take on it as identifying broad areas of agreement about Islam, and the social blind spot that was the focal point of the argument, is far more telling as an indication that supposedly the most liberal elements within the American media have utterly lost patience with Muslim communities inability or unwillingness to police their own ranks. It brings to mind Daniel Patrick Moynihan's call for a 'benign neglect' of racial matters during the first Nixon presidential administration. One can argue about what Moynihan actually meant, but the import is clear that excuse-making and turning a blind eye toward rampant misbehavior was not on his dance card.
Likewise, both the program host and moderator, and his guests, were signaling, almost apologetically for some, that enough was enough. I think that most viewers would agree with them on that point.
Lawrence O'Donnell, Boston Irish to the core, attended Catholic parochial schools in his home neighborhood of Dorchester before attending Harvard College. Given his upbringing, Lawrence's family, friends, and neighbors might have preferred that he attend Boston College instead. In my view, both Lawrence and Harvard each benefited enormously from their association with each other.
Normally, I trust Lawrence's judgment on these sort of things, but when he says that the Catholic Church has learned to moderate its virulent opposition towards those who believe differently, I have to take exception. The 'maturity' that Lawrence cites was born of weakness and exhaustion, and a steadfast opposition to democracy, and clinging wherever possible to assorted rights and privileges that the church had acquired over the centuries. In recent times, in those European countries where the Catholic Church had outsized influence, Spain under Franco, Portugal under Salazar, and even in the Irish Republic, churchmen behaved very badly; and they largely got away with it because religious practices turned a blind eye to the abuses they perpetrated.
Even in Lawrence's beloved Boston, the Roman Catholic archdiocese was found to have engaged in horrific abuses of young children that were common knowledge for decades before the pressure of civil lawsuits and criminal prosecutions was brought to bear. For his part, Cardinal Bernard Law was forced to resign; but instead of facing prosecution for conspiracy and criminal negligence, he got himself transferred to Rome, a promotion to a post within the Vatican hierarchy, and leaving to others to clean up the mess he made of it.
If maturity can be described as understanding the consequences of one's actions, and the cause-and-effect relationships between actions and their conceivable consequences, then no religious institution of any sort can be said to be mature if its practitioners defer to church elders, priests, or religious zealots who justify their actions by pointing to eventual betterment in some spiritual world yet to come. That heaven-focused view must necessarily come at the expense of those who live in the here and now. Zealotry's refusal to give heed to the rights of others who might disagree with them, whether in the physical world, or in any spiritual world yet to come, is the core of the problem.
That zealotry can only survive if both the zealots themselves and their surrounding community of believers see the outside world is a threat. The greater the threat, the greater the amount of social cohesiveness the zealots demand, and the more strident the demand of strict conformity. That was true of the Inquisition, communism under the Soviet Union, and now we see similar demands from right-wing Jews in Israel. Islamic countries are under intense pressure from the outside world. Some of that pressure arises from the ongoing schism between its Sunni and Shia factions who deny each other's legitimacy, and consequently, the legitimacy of anyone else who believes differently. The Islamic world is also under pressure from Iran, whose empire more than once in ancient times fought over Arab lands, and conquered much of it. Muslim countries by and large cannot compete against the industrialized world on anything resembling equal terms. They allow themselves to be exploited for oil and other mineral wealth, for the benefit of a tiny elite, who not coincidently, support extremist elements within their respective religious sects. In this respect, their acting no differently than the Catholic Church behaved in medieval Europe prior to the Reformation.
No, this is not about maturity of a religious institution, any religious institution. It is primarily about mutual backscratching between wealthy and powerful elites and the very willing churchmen who support them by giving them religious cover in exchange for temporal wealth and power.
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