Sorry about the Apology

Kudos to our readers for successfully baiting the bloggers!

Today's post, a day late and a dollar short (I promised to post on Tuesday, and to include a syllabus -- more on that below), is a response to a question about why Muslims never seem to apologize:

Just wondering if you might have a few words of snark for religions that, oh, publicly execute raped women, or topple stone walls on top of gays. And, as far as I can see, the soi-disant moderates of these religions don't even bother to register a protest when this stuff happens. Can we get a witness?

I responded (making the assumption that the snide reference was to Islam) that there is a flood of Muslims who disavow and criticize oppressive misrepresentations of Islam.

Since beginning to compose this post today in the snippets of free time (obligations to my parish and family coming first, dear readers), a further comment has been made crossing the line from critical to blatant, willful ignorance fueling Islamophobia. I won't bother reproducing it here, but you can read it in the "Stupidity is non-discriminatory" thread).

Here I'm going to ignore the advice of Holy Scripture, "Do not answer fools according to their folly, or you will be a fool yourself" (Proverbs 16:4) but take the advice of Holy Scripture, "Answer fools according to their folly, or they will be wise in their own eyes" (Proverbs 16.5 Go figure...). I'm responding because the views expressed are hardly unique.

The promised syllabus is going to have to wait another week -- not because there is a lack of sources, but because there are many and to provide a useful annotated bibliography requires more time than I can provide in the week before Ash Wednesday. Writing about this, as I do below (at crazy length), I can do in bits of free time. A useful syllabus takes a different kind of research that can't be done from my laptop at work. Sorry about the delay.

Now, in scholastic tradition, I will lay out a series of arguments. There's nothing funny in this post; if you want funny, I suggest going to "Allah Made Me Funny" instead.


Argument the First: There is a significant movement in every Muslim community working against extremist fundamentalism.

The assertion has been made moderates don't protest acts of violence carried out by Muslim extremists. This assertion is patently untrue.

Yes, there are a number of Muslim-majority countries with extremists governments or judiciaries, just as as well as Muslim majority countries which are fully democratic but may have radical muslim movements. In each of these countries, there are also movements of Muslims who believe that Islam and human rights (including equal rights for women) are totally compatible. Here are just a couple : Sisters in Islam (Malaysia), Change for Equality (Iran). There are more, but that reference work is part of the syllabus project that you'll just have to wait for.

Being a human rights activist is dangerous work in countries that don't respect human rights -- witness the murder of Zil-e Huma Usman in Pakistan-- and so it's not surprising that those countries which are both Muslim-majority and non-democratic, we hear less about the activists. The murder of human rights activists in Pakistan is seen as a proof that Islam is undemocratic. Is the murder of human rights activists in Burma a proof that Buddhists are fanatical oppressors?

What is true, is that protests by Muslim moderates are very rarely covered by the press for a variety of reasons. One reason is that what bleeds leads; a story about rabid bearded men is going to get more play than a peaceful protest or letter to the editor. Another reason is that a number of developing countries have oppressive governments that suppress such protests -- and most Muslims live in developing countries.

Finally, there are a number of Muslim majority countries that have very good human rights records. Morocco, for example, has enacted a number of reforms that support women's rights (while the United States voted down the Equal Rights Act a number of years ago). Malaysia is a large Muslim country with a strong matriarchal and matrilineal culture. Indonesia has a steadily improving human rights record. [Interesting side note, there is a higher percentage of women in the Iranian parliament than there is in the US congress; ditto for the percentage of women at University/College. I'm not saying that Iran is great on women's rights, but that perhaps the pot shouldn't be so quick to call the kettle black.]

If you compare neighboring Muslim and non-Muslim countries in a given region, you don't see any strong correlation between religion and human rights (for eg, Burma, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia -- only Malaysia, a Muslim majority, is not ruled by a military junta [or in the case of Thailand, recently ruled by a junta though now a democracy again]). There is nothing within Islam or any other religion that predisposes folks to extremism -- the factors that lead to oppressive state regimes have to do with economics, education, colonial and military history.


Argument the Second: Who should be apologizing, and to whom?

I do not expect the pope to apologize for the rape and violence carried out in the name of Jesus by the Fundamentalist Church of Later Day Saints. Yet both the Pope and the FLDS both consider themselves Christian, and the Pope is the leader of the largest group of Christians in the world. I don't expect Thich Nhat Hanh to apologize for the actions of the Burmese junta, even though Burma is majority Buddhist and particularly discriminates against their Christian and Muslim minorities. I don't expet Elie Wiesel to apologize for sections of Deuteronomy that encourage Jews to rape war captives ( cf. Deuteronomy 21:10-14 ).

Why would I expect that Muslim moderates, working to uphold an Islamic tradition of human rights, apologize to me or to the West in general? Am I God because I'm an American, that they should apologize to me?


Argument the Third: Crimes Committed by White Christians are treated as abnormalities, while crimes committed by Muslims are treated as "Islamic"

Until very recently, it was legal in Texas to kill your wife if you discover she is committing adultery (Article 1132 section 2 in, Title XV of the Texas Penal Code, which you can read thanks to google books here) . This is not seen as a tenant of the Christian faith, though the law was written by a majority Christian state and is supported by Christian scriptures (Deuteronomy 22:21; while Jesus prevented the carrying out of this penalty, he also stated that he did not intend to change one iota of the law [Mt. 5:17-18], and did not directly disavow the Deuteronomic text). If a man kills his wife for adultery, on the other hand, under sharia (Islamic law) this would be considered murder.

The gruesome beheading of Aaisiya Hassan this week in New York is a murder case, and would be treated as murder in Islamic courts as well. It is not an act condoned by Islam. While sharia, like Jewish, Christian and other religious laws, does have a death penalty for adultery, the penalty is almost impossible to carry out in Islam -- it requires two respectable witnesses to have seen the actual act of penetration, and by seeing the act they themselves become less than respectable witnesses. As far as I can tell from the hadith (the acts and sayings of the prophet), the Prophet Mohammed worked to make sure to minimized the use of the death penalty -- a dramatic and liberal reformation for his time.

According to the United States Department of Justice, over 50% of murders in the United are committed by family members -- spouses, relatives or boyfriends/girlfriends. Quite honestly, the idea that "honor killings" are a particularly Muslim idea is not supported by the data. "Honor Killings" are against Islamic law, and the rates of such killings are comparable to that in other societies including here in the US.


Argument the Fourth: Secularists and Atheists are not Immune to Stupidity

Dan has already made the argument that stupidity occurs with fundamentalists in every religion, so I won't repeat it much further. I will say, though, that violent fundamentalism is not caused by religion. Religion is a convenient vehicle, but some of the worst genocides of the modern era have been carried out by atheists (Stalin, the Khmer Rouge), secularists (Ataturk), and neo-pagans (Hitler, who claimed both to be Catholic and lamented the loss of pre-Christian pagan religion and worked to restore it in Nazi propaganda). Eliminating religion would in no way end racism, sexism, homophobia, or the violence that accompanies these sins.


Argument the Fifth: The West shares some culpability in supporting Extremists within Islam

It is interesting to notice how much modern Islamic fundamentalism is borrowed from Western sources -- the nasty anti-semitism coming from fundamentalists, for instance, often uses a source created by Christians, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." The recent stance against Darwinism by some Muslims (including Yusef Islam) is likewise a copy of Christian fundamentalism. Nor should we forget that the United States funded and supported the Taliban for years. What would Islam look like today if we hadn't been giving money to Muslim extreemists in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and elsewhere, and been giving that support instead to pro-democratic Muslim movements?

Is it all the evil colonialsts fault? Of course not. We're talking about grown adults here, and idiots like Ahmenidjad have only themselves to blame for being stupid, violent, anti-semitic homophobes. But I object to a kind of exceptionalism that believes that every other religion has 'outgrown' violence except Muslims. We continue to inform one another, in both directions -- witness Pete Sessions, a Republican congressman from Texas, who declared to the National Review that the GOP should model themselves on the Taliban.


Arguement the Sixth: Islam was historically the most progressive religion viz. human rights, and many Muslims are working to restore Islam to the progressive edge.

At the beginning of Islam, Muslim countries had the most progressive stances in the world on the rights of women and religious minorities -- rights to own property, to be safe in ones home, the right to divorce, access to education, etc. This at a time in Europe when women were chattel and Jews were being killed in progroms.

Until this last century, married women in Christian countries such as the United Kingdom could not own property. Women did not have the right to a divorce even from an abusive husband. It was legal to kill your wife in Texas (and several other states) if she commits adultery; it is still legal throughout most of the United States to discriminate against someone if they aren't heterosexual, and it is still legal in many states to rape your wife -- permission for spousal rape being largely based on the writings of Saint Paul. Women did not gain the right to vote in some parts of Christian, calvinist Switzerland until 1971 (and in at least one canton in 1990). Perhaps we should be apologizing to Muslims for how many of our governments have treated women as well as racial and religious minorities? Oh sorry, it's only Muslims that have to apologize...


In conclusion...

Yes, there are huge areas of civil rights in some Muslim-majority countries that need to be addressed and fixed, and every one of the Muslims I know (and that's hundreds) are working to address those issues. Some of them are vocal activists, others work quietly behind the scenes or within their own communities without feeling the need to issue personal statements to Christians about their commitment to human rights.

Yes, we err if we think that because our nation is killing hundreds of Muslims a week that we should cut them some liberal 'slack' about human rights. And we err if we lie about the violence of the West and pretend that Islam is a uniquely violent religion. Such lies may boost our own egos and insescurities, but they do a grave diservice to Muslim human rights activists and put them in a terrible bind -- when we repeat those lies, we help perpetuate the false impression that "human rights" is a Western trojan horse for attacking Islam.

I believe human rights across the world will improve much more quickly if we are honest about our own shortcomings as well, and if we hold everyone to the same standards and expectations, without resorting to anti-religious bigotry.