Over at The Atlantic, Brian Mockenhaupt reports that US Marines are teaching a kinder, gentler kind of Islam than that which prevails among the Taliban. Who needs Mullah Omar’s conservative and bellicose version of Islam when you can have the Huffington Post’s progressive and peaceful version:

A chaplain since 1999, [Navy chaplain] Solomon had arrived for his first Afghanistan deployment ready to deliver sermons, lead Bible studies, and offer counsel about marital problems, fear, and the sharp grief of losing friends. He has performed those staples of military chaplaincy, but he and his colleagues have also increasingly found themselves in the unexpected role of counterinsurgent.

This is tricky territory for chaplains, whose job is to facilitate religious expression, but not, as noncombatants, to participate in the prosecution of war. That’s an easy distinction on a battlefield: say prayers with the troops; don’t fight beside them. But what about when interpretations of religion can either feed violence or quell it?

The relative lack of education in rural Afghanistan complicates this challenge. Many of the area’s mullahs, the equivalent of small-town preachers, can’t read and write in Pashto, never mind Arabic, the language of the Koran. That makes it hard for them to deeply understand the Koran and the tenets of Islam, and easy for the Taliban to spread its version of both the duties of good Muslims.

Here, “deep understanding” is code for “our understanding.” Solomon and his Afghani assistant are giving “Koran lessons” so local citizens can understand “Islam’s true nature.” Islam does not have an essential  “nature.” Lacking any such nature, there can be no “true” Islam. There will always be many kinds of “Islams.”

All this aside, the Marines would get more bang for their proselytizing buck by teaching literacy in conjunction with reader response theory. And if the Marines really wanted to be subversive, they would hire Stanley Fish to revise his book and ask the locals: Is There a Koran in This Village?

Whether unwittingly or deliberately, the series title immediately brings to mind Edward Said’s Orientalism, in which Said took particular aim at historian Bernard Lewis for essentializing and demonizing all things Muslim:

[Lewis] proclaim[s] that Islam is an irrational herd or mass phenomenon, ruling Muslims by passions, instincts, and unreflecting hatreds. The whole point of this exposition is to frighten his audience, to make it never yield an inch to Islam. According to Lewis, Islam does not develop, and neither do Muslims; they merely are, and they are to be watched, on account of that pure essence of theirs (according to Lewis), which happens to include a long-standing hatred of Christians and Jews.

Ironically, Said was specifically condemning British and American constructions of the Orient and explicitly excluded German Orientalism, which he considered to have a “clean” — or a non-colonial, non-imperial — past.  With the German gaze now firmly fixated on Muslims in their midst and the plight of fellow Christians in the Orient, I wonder whether Said (were he alive) would stand by this assessment today.

The state-of-the-art 70,000 square foot museum brings the pages of the Bible to life, casting its characters and animals in dynamic form and placing them in familiar settings. Adam and Eve live in the Garden of Eden. Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden’s Rivers. The serpent coils cunningly in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

By all accounts, the Creation Museum has been a smashing financial success, catering primarily to the forty percent of Americans who believe (along with most Muslims) that God (or Allah) created the world of living creatures within the past ten thousand years, and that Adam and Eve’s family frolicked with dinosaurs.

Leaving aside for a moment the moral conundrum facing Adam and Eve’s children (“Do I really have to sleep with my sister?“), and the fact that most sexually reproducing organisms are incest averse for very good biological reasons, the group behind the museum has announced plans to build a nearby Noah’s ark park, which is expected to draw 1.6 million believers each year:

The Ark Encounter is a one-of-a-kind historically themed attraction. In an entertaining, educational, and immersive way, it presents a number of historical events centered on a full-size, all-wood Ark, which should become the largest timber-frame structure in the USA.

Plans for the attraction include a Walled City, the Tower of Babel, a first-century Middle Eastern village, a journey in history from Abraham to the parting of the Red Sea, a walk-through aviary, a large petting zoo, and so on.

This wonderful looking for-profit park is slated to open in 2014, depending on how fast the faithful donate to make it happen.  You can add to the current total of nearly one million dollars by purchasing a wooden peg for $100, a plank for $1000, or a beam for $5000.  The state of Kentucky is doing its righteous part by providing generous tax breaks.

When all is said and done, families will be able to plan entire vacations around the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter.  In the meantime, they can visit Bedrock City, the historically accurate paleolithic Flintstones theme park in Custer, South Dakota:

Yabba dabba doo and please pass the Brontosaurus ribs!

While much of the article is devoted to bad architecture and sullied views, the problems run much deeper than mere design:

“It is the commercialization of the house of God,” said Sami Angawi, a Saudi architect who founded a research center that studies urban planning issues surrounding the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, and has been one of the development’s most vocal critics. “The closer to the mosque, the more expensive the apartments. In the most expensive towers, you can pay millions” for a 25-year leasing agreement, he said. “If you can see the mosque, you pay triple.”

That mentality is dividing the holy city of Mecca — and the pilgrimage experience — along highly visible class lines, with the rich sealed inside exclusive air-conditioned high-rises encircling the Grand Mosque and the poor pushed increasingly to the periphery.

The issue is not just run-of-the-mill class conflict. The city’s makeover also reflects a split between those who champion turbocharged capitalism and those who think it should stop at the gates of Mecca, which they see as the embodiment of an Islamic ideal of egalitarianism.

Here in the West, and especially in the United States, there are several things we can learn from these developments. First, “Islam” is not a unified religious tradition and individual Muslims can be and are quite different from one another.  There are multiple Islams and all kinds of Muslims. Second, money, consumption, and capitalism — all aspects of modernity against which a small number of jihadists are fighting — are having major impacts on the highly diverse Muslim world.

It should be obvious that huge numbers of Muslims are quite comfortable with modernity and welcome it.  This portion of the Muslim world is growing and will change the international face of Islam over the coming decades.

As is the case with all things it touches and ultimately transforms, commerce will be king.

The first, by Frank Hornig and Michael Sontheimer, discusses the first ever Hitler exhibition at the German History Museum in Berlin.  As one might imagine, the curators had to approach the subject delicately and spent six years working on the presentation.  Why such concern?  Hitler was more than a politician — he deftly combined cultural eschatology with salvation, deliberately employing religious techniques:

Typifying the entire exhibition is an essay by Ian Kershaw, the British biographer of Hitler, who describes Hitler supporters’ quasi-religious relationship to their messiah. “It’s a miracle of our times that you have found me,” the dictator declared to 140,000 excited supporters in Nuremberg in 1936, “that you have found me among so many millions! And that I have found you, that is Germany’s good fortune!”

Kershaw takes a sentence uttered by a Nazi state secretary — that every German should “work toward the Führer to fulfill his goals” — as a good explanation of the inner logic of the Nazi dictatorship and of the crimes committed by a population that sometimes acted on its own initiative.

The German History Museum exhibition includes evidence supporting this thesis. There is a tapestry, for example, embroidered by members of two women’s groups in the town of Rotenburg an der Fulda. It shows Hitler Youth, SA and League of German Girls formations arranged in the shape of a cross, marching toward a church. The embroiderers further embellished the work with the text of the Lord’s Prayer in half cross-stitch.

Here we have a splendid example of the ways in which nationalism amounts to what we might call civil religion.  In the case of National Socialism and much modern nationalism, it might be better to call it uncivil religion.

My German friends would be the first to say, and have often said, that is all in the past and the new generation has moved on.  Apparently not.  In the second article, by Ole Reissmann, a survey of 2,500 Germans reveals that far right attitudes are widespread and on the rise.  Jews, while still suspect, have taken second seat to Muslims:

For the first time, the pollsters asked whether the practice of Islam should be significantly restricted in Germany. A total of 58.4 percent of respondents said that it should be, even though such a restriction would violate Germany’s constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion.

What is particularly pertinent is that 55.5 percent of respondents who tended to otherwise reject right-wing extremist statements agreed with the statement on the practice of Islam. The study’s authors characterized this as a “modern racism,” which is based on cultural differences rather than on supposed genetic differences.

Some 17.2 percent of respondents agreed with the statement: “Even today, Jews have too much influence.”

The survey covered a number of other topics which are indicative of what the researchers call a “unified right-wing world view” (Weltanschauung), and the results are disturbing.  Before Americans and others begin clucking with schadenfreude, it might be best to look in the mirror deeply.

If you read the entire post and interview, you will understand my not so subtle use of quotation brackets above.  I particularly enjoyed this comment from Hughes about his book, Situating Islam:

As for those the book is aligned against, I would have to say the entire apologetical and liberal Protestant interpretation of Islam. Needless to say, this does not always make me popular in Islamic Studies circles.

Those who talk about not offending Muslim sensibilities as an excuse to avoid talking about the redaction history of the Qur’an or the historical Muhammad; those who want to define an “authentic” Islam (that is liberal, peaceful, and democratic); those who put together AAR panels wherein liberal Muslim academics talk about their experiences and vision of their particular version of Islam. I rail against all of this.

None of this is scholarship, but theology and ecumenicism, which I personally do not have a problem with so long as those doing it make it clear to others that this is what they are doing. Too much slippage between scholarship and apologetics occurs in Islamic Studies for my liking.

You can find a nice example of such slippage here.

Before highlighting some of the more interesting statements from the interview (which I encourage you to read in its entirety), I want to congratulate the anonymous Spiegel interviewer.  If we could only get Brian Williams, Katie Couric, or Anderson Cooper to ask questions like these, American national debates would benefit immeasurably.

The interviewee, Hamed Abdel-Samad, has a remarkable biography:

Hamed Abdel-Samad grew up in Egypt as the son of an imam. He came to Germany at the age of 23, and he has lived here for most of the last 15 years. He worked as an academic in Erfurt and Braunschweig and conducted research at the Institute for Jewish History and Culture at the University of Munich before deciding to devote himself entirely to his writing. Though highly critical of Islam, Abdel-Samad has never turned away from the faith completely. His new book “Der Untergang der islamischen Welt” (“The Downfall of the Islamic World”) is published by Munich’s Droemer Verlag.

The interview commences with this is inauspicious exchange:

SPIEGEL: You predict the “downfall of the Islamic world,” to quote the title of your new book. But Islam is the fastest growing of all religions, and Europe, in particular, is worried about being overwhelmed by Muslims.

Abdel-Samad: The numbers don’t tell us very much. There are 1.4 billion Muslims. So what? The important thing is that in almost all countries with a Muslim majority, we see the decline of civilization and a stagnation of all forms of life. Islam has no convincing answers to the challenges of the 21st century. It is in intellectual, moral and cultural decline — a doomed religion, without self-awareness and without any options to act.

If this were the gist of the interview, American rightists would be nodding their heads in agreement and American leftists would be shaking their heads with frustration.  But with the next question the interviewer saves the day and receives a sobering response:

SPIEGEL: Aren’t you making the mistake of many radical critics of Islam, by lumping together the entire religion, in all of its many forms?

Abdel-Samad: Of course our religion has many directions. The differences may be of interest to theologians and anthropologists, but they are quite irrelevant from a political standpoint. The decisive element is the general lack of direction and backwardness, which often lead to an aggressive fundamentalism. That sets the general tone.

Leave it to a political scientist to remind anthropologists and theologians there is a difference between the world of description and thought, and the world of action.  For those familiar with the early history of Marxism and Bolshevism, this should sound familiar.  While the intellectuals were hard at work producing brilliant works of critical theory and the working classes continued to do what was necessary to survive, there were always those who were inclined to action, of the most decisive and homicidal sort.  Lenin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh were fundamentalists of a kind who believed that small groups of able people (the vanguard) could transform society from the top and deal with the directionless bottom later.

After issuing this warning, Abdel-Samad opines:

In a sense, Islam is like a drug, like alcohol. A small amount can have a healing and inspiring effect, but when the believer reaches for the bottle of dogmatic faith in every situation, it gets dangerous. This high-proof form of Islam is what I’m talking about. It harms the individual and damages society. It inhibits integration, because this Islam divides the world into friends and enemies, into the faithful and the infidels.

Standing alone, this opinion does not say much — it is primarily a conclusion.  But in the context of Abdel-Samad’s life, experiences, and learning — all of which are discussed in the remainder of the interview, it says a great deal.

While Radford notes that Muslims tend to take blasphemy very seriously — it is a killing offense — he does not explain why this is so.  Without having researched or deeply considered the issue, it strikes me as a matter of collective insecurity that is a bit odd.  Before some get too high on their horse about such matters, Radford provides a nice rundown of blasphemy’s bloody Christian history.

There is, probably first and certainly foremost, religious anti-Semitism. Unlike other nations or peoples, Jews were among the witnesses to the alleged lives and preachings of Jesus and Muhammad, and turned away from men they deemed false Messiahs. It is inconceivable that they will ever be quite forgiven for doing so.

There also is a continuation of the video interview, in which Hitchens makes some interesting observations regarding insular “organic societies” and how they are perturbed by the presence of alien and questioning Jews.

Nazi Book Burning

Either way it is a far-sighted, content-neutral municipal ordinance that should pass First Amendment scrutiny.  Despite being denied a permit, the intolerant zealots at Dove have vowed to go ahead with the burning.

To justify their actions, church leaders have helpfully provided us with a “Ten Reasons to Burn a Koran” list (10 being a magic number for wrathful Old Testament types).  The list positively drips with irony and ignorance.  I have abridged the list and added italicized comments after each item:

1.  The Koran teaches that Jesus Christ, the Crucified, Risen Son of God, King of Kings and Lord of Lords was NOT the Son of God, nor was he crucified (a well documented historical fact that ONLY Islam denies). This teaching removes the possibility of salvation and eternal life in heaven for all Islam’s believers. They face eternal damnation in hell if they do not repent.

There are close to 7 billion people in the world and only about 2 billion of them are Christians.  This means that 5 billion people now living are destined for hell because they do not believe Jesus was the son of God.  Hell will be crowded.

2. The Koran does not have an eternal origin. It is not recorded in heaven. The Almighty God, Creator of the World, is NOT it’s source. It is not holy. It’s writings are human in origin, a concoction of old and new teachings.

These comments apply equally well to the Christian Bible.

3. The Koran’s teaching includes Arabian idolatry, paganism, rites and rituals.

This too describes Christian beliefs and practices, if one replaces “Arabian” with “Greco-Roman.”

4. The earliest writings that are known to exist about the Prophet Mohammad were recorded 120 years after his death. All of the Islamic writings (the Koran and the Hadith, the biographies, the traditions and histories) are confused, contradictory and inconsistent.

These assertions apply equally to the composition, compilation, and exegesis of Christian texts.

5. Mohammad’s life and message cannot be respected. They also led to political assassinations and massacres which continue to be carried out on a regular basis by his followers today.

Have these people ever read about the Christian Crusades, Thirty Years War, Heresy Trials, and Inquisitions?

6. Islamic Law is totalitarian in nature. There is no separation of church and state. It is irrational. It is supposedly immutable and cannot be changed. It must be accepted without criticism.

Since when have evangelicals supported the separation of church and state, or accepted criticism of their beliefs?

7. Islam is not compatible with democracy and human rights. The notion of a moral individual capable of making decisions and taking responsibility for them does not exist in Islam. The attitude towards women in Islam as inferior possessions of men has led to countless cases of mistreatment and abuse.

Since the time of Constantine (~324 C.E.), Christianity has been associated with empire, monarchy, and despotism. Christianity has been linked to democracy in only a few countries over the past two centuries.  We can grant that Islam has serious problems when it comes to women, but Christians have always had their fair share of patriarchal domination.

8. A Muslim does not have the right to change his religion. Apostasy is punishable by death.

Again, Christianity has a long history of executing those it considers heretics.

9. Deep in the Islamic teaching and culture is the irrational fear and loathing of the West.

This is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black — the West has an irrational fear and loathing of “Islam,” which is neither unified nor hegemonic.

10. Islam is a weapon of Arab imperialism and Islamic colonialism. Wherever Islam has or gains political power, Christians, Jews and all non-Moslems receive persecution, discrimination, are forced to convert. There are massacres and churches, synagogues, temples and other places of worship are destroyed.

This is another perfect description of European-Christian imperialism and colonialism.  Do these people know about the Spanish conquests of the New World?  This also applies to American-Christian imperialism and colonialism, a perfect example of which is the near extermination of Native Americans and their forced conversion to Christianity.

My comments should neither be taken as a defense of Islam nor a condemnation of Christianity.  I am simply pointing out that the bill of particulars used by zealous and intolerant Christians to condemn Islam applies with equal force to their own faith, if only they knew its history.