[Mb-civic] Misunderstanding Muslims

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Misunderstanding Muslims

By James Carroll | February 13, 2006 | The Boston Globe

WHEN THE KORAN was said to have been denigrated by American guards at 
Guantanamo last year, Muslims reacted with rage, but most observers in 
the West misunderstood why.

It was easy for Christians and Jews -- the other ''people of the Book" 
-- to think that such an insult to the Koran was like an insult to the 
Bible. That would be sacrilege enough, but it was worse than that.

Drawing analogies between religions can mislead, but the Koran stands in 
Islamic belief more as Jesus does in Christian faith than as the Bible. 
As this Christian understands it, the Koran embodies the incarnational 
principle, with the chanting of the holy words that came from God to 
Mohammed as the way God's presence is experienced again.

Non-Muslims tend to think that the Prophet is to Islam something like 
what Jesus is to Christianity (which is why non-Muslims have mistakenly 
called the religion ''Mohammedanism"), but it is the Koran that holds 
such a central place. Hence, Islamic visual celebration is calligraphy, 
not images. Therefore when the Koran is disrespected, the insult Muslims 
feel is nothing less than insult to God.

Insult, of course, is the issue that has been put so explosively before 
the world recently. The Danish cartoons were a flame applied to a primed 
fuse, and the extraordinary reactions to the images from across the 
whole House of Islam point beyond the immediate provocation to a far 
broader sense of insult that Muslims have been made to feel.

One need not excuse the indiscriminate violence of mobs in the streets, 
nor dismiss the good question of why such rage is not directed against 
the blasphemy of suicide-murders carried out in the name of Allah to 
take a lesson from what has happened. The Islamic world seems 
astoundingly united in sending a stern message to ''the West," and 
instead of focusing again on ''what went wrong" with Islam Europeans and 
Americans would do well to take that message in.

Thinking of deep history, for example, we might recall that the very 
structures of politics, culture, and thought that define western 
civilization were expressly erected in opposition to Islam more than 
1,000 years ago.

What we call ''the West" was born in the clash of civilizations that 
climaxed in the Crusades, with Muslims assigned the role of the external 
''negative other" against which Christendom defined itself positively 
(The internal ''negative other" were the Jews). Among Europeans, and 
then Americans, that intellectual polarity was sublimated over the 
centuries, but its insult remained current among Muslims, and was 
powerfully resuscitated by the assault of colonialism.

The economics of oil, including the creation of an oppressive local 
class of Western-sponsored oligarchs, locked the grievous insult in 
place. As if to be sure it was more sharply felt than ever, Europe 
imported ''guest workers" from the Islamic world, openly consigning them 
to an underclass that is as religiously defined as it is permanent.

And then the United States launched its wars. One of the major 
disconnects in the present conflict is the way in which European and 
American analysis obsesses with the apparently anarchic outbursts of 
violence in the ''Arab street" without taking in how brutally violent 
the post-9/11 ''coalition" assault has been, not only physically but 
psychologically.

Mobs throw stones through the windows of European consulate offices, and 
the legion of CNN watchers recoils with horror. Meanwhile, unmanned 
drones fly across stretches of desert to drop loads of fire on the heads 
of subsistence farmers in their villages; children die, but CNN is not 
there.

Billions of dollars are being poured each month into the project of 
imposing an American solution on an Arab problem, and increasingly the 
solution looks, from the other side, like annihilation. Muslims, that 
is, understand the new reality far better than non-Muslims do -- the 
state of open cultural warfare that ''the West" imagines is a narrowly 
targeted war against ''terrorism." Muslims, as Muslims, experience 
themselves as on the receiving end of a savage -- but, alas, not 
unprecedented -- assault.

Are they wrong? In the argument over ''Enlightenment" values, sparked by 
the cartoons, some champions of free expression have fallen into the 
deadly old mistake that led, in the 20th century, to a grotesque 
betrayal of those very values -- the over-under ranking of human beings, 
with the lives of some being counted as cheap.

Why are we killing them? As with multiple problems today, this one comes back to 
the misbegotten American war. It threatens to ignite the 
century, and must be stopped.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/13/misu
nderstanding_muslims/


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 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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