Multiculturalism and the moral order

This story reminds that there is a great potential friendship between conservatives and Muslims when it comes to instilling positive values in our children, and resisting the trend to secularism.  Here’s an excerpt, though I recommend reading the whole piece:

Then I looked across the school playground and saw a Muslim mother, the mother of my daughter’s best friend, holding her headscarf in place with her hands as the wind blew about restlessly. I caught her eye for a moment and we smiled at each other. Before this moment, I had never thought that my situation in any shape or form was similar to that of a Muslim mother. And I had never thought seriously about talking to a Muslim mother about issues of faith or raising children in our community. But now I was beginning to reconsider. Perhaps our Muslim fellow citizens, especially those who are spiritually and intellectually confident in their ways of life, can challenge and inspire us to reflect more deeply on our own faith and morality, and perhaps in the process we might discover that we share some of the same moral principles and hopes and dreams for our children.

We always hear so much about the things that separate Muslims from Christians (and no doubt there are things that do separate us), and often these differences are expressed in negative and prejudiced ways. I wonder if our misunderstandings and misconceptions prevent some of us from trusting and forming spiritual bonds and friendships with those who are confronting some of the very same challenges that we confront. I live in a community where many of my moral views about sexuality, marriage, and the family are in the minority. Sometimes they are challenged (respectfully and disrespectfully), and every now and again someone agrees with them, but often they are simply dismissed. Like my daughter, I’m comforted to know that there is someone else with whom I share similar experiences (and perhaps a moral view or two).

There is, perhaps, a different brand of multiculturalism that underscores rather than undermines the moral order.  It’s a shame that many conservatives have written off American Muslims because of disagreements on certain narrow political or foreign policy views, when we really have so much to agree on.

Forged in War

In Michael Barone’s piece in the latest edition of the Claremont Review of Books, he reviews Thomas Bruscino’s A Nation Forged in War: How World War II Taught Americans How to Get Along.  Some of the figures Barone relays are interesting.  While Hollywood’s habit of putting a colorful Brooklyn loudmouth in every war movie may seem unbelievable, in fact, nearly 3 of every 50 Americans in the 1940s was from one of New York’s five boroughs.   For all their atrocities, the 20th century’s wars united America’s disparate and bickering races and religions in a common story and purpose.  America’s various peoples were put into a common uniform and given standard issue weapons and supplies, and made to rely on each other in the worst of all possible conditions.  Barone describes the profound impact of Bruscino’s story of four chaplains of different faiths, including Jewish, sacrificing their life jackets to their troops and praying together as their torpedoed ship sank in the North Atlantic.  As a result of the shared experiences of America’s formerly disparate peoples, America was a more united and harmonious nation after 1945.

Certainly, war is not the only sort of experience that can bring Americans together.  But it is hard to imagine a more powerful and fast-acting one.  I couldn’t help but reflect on the fact that there are few war stories that involve Muslims as our American brothers-in-arms.  Quite the opposite, in fact, in this age of the War on Terror.  I also wondered about the tendency of Muslims to enlist in the U.S. military.  According to the NY Sun in 2006:

Out of the 1.4 million service men and women serving actively in the American military, an estimated 3,700 are Muslim, according to the Department of Defense.

The Wall Street Journal puts the number at 3,409 as of April 2008, according to Pentagon statistics. This comes to about a quarter of a percent.  Since many Muslims choose not to indicate their religion upon enlistment, the actual number is estimated to be up to three times higher, approximately 10,000, or just under three-fourths of a percent.

Compare this with the percentage of Muslims in the U.S. population at large.  Pew Research Center puts the number of U.S. Muslims at 2.5 million in 2009, putting Muslims at about 0.8% of the total U.S. population.  Thus, it would appear that Muslims are actually enrolling in the military at a higher rate than their proportion of the general population.  This is commendable, I think.

The Muslim PR Problem

Here are some of my take-away thoughts from the Federalist Society discussion today on the big three current issues concerning America’s tense relationship with Islam:  Koran burning, the Oklahoma Sharia law, and the Ground Zero Mosque.

First, the idea that the Muslim community center planned for development at Park51 might be the result of pure intentions is simply not credible for many Americans.  As a colleague observed, either Abdul Rauf & co. are akin to the nuns at Auschwitz, or they are truly trying to extend the olive branch and advance the cause of Muslim goodwill.  It is hard to believe the latter given the divisiveness of the project.

Professor Larry Rosenthal, under whom I studied First Amendment law and criminal procedure at Chapman, makes a strong case for permitting the Park51 project.  There is little question the Constitution protects the right to develop the mosque.  The more perplexing problem, however, is how we deal with prevailing American attitudes about Muslims and Islam.  Rosenthal emphasized that there is no shortage of examples in our history of Americans “overreacting” to perceived problems with other religious and racial groups.  We were once confident that Jews—“Christ-killers”—could not be assimilated into our predominately Christian culture.  And yet today we proudly proclaim our “Judeo-Christian values.”  We overreacted to Japanese-Americans during WWII and, on the basis of security concerns, indiscriminately interned them without a shred of evidence of any Japanese-Americans abetting the Japanese war effort.  From these sorts of examples, Rosenthal argues that we have every reason to distrust our intuitions about races, cultures, and religions that may seem strange and foreign to us today.  It is within our power to “choose” not to be offended at the Park51 project and, Rosenthal urged, we ought to so choose.

There is something to this argument.  Certainly, we have to be cautious not to repeat mistakes we’ve already made.  And the Park51 project seems innocuous enough—it’s just a community center, after all.  And it’s not even physically at “Ground Zero.”  It’s at an old Burlington Coat Factory two blocks away, near two strip clubs and a lingerie store, among other things.

In fact, the whole thing seems like such a non-issue that this itself becomes an issue:  Why are Americans so apoplectic about what seems like such an innocuous project?

My theory is that Muslims are simply bad at PR.  Consider two other religions with rocky starts in American culture, Mormons and Jews.  Mormons gave up polygamy long ago as a condition for gaining statehood in Utah.  Jews spun off the Reformed Judaism movement in large part to advance their ability to assimilate and gain acceptance among Americans.  In so doing, both groups have gained wide acceptance in American culture.  Muslims, on the other hand, still tend to be somewhat monolithic.  While American Muslims are probably much more moderate than Muslims in other parts of the world.  And Americans certainly want to believe this.  Yet, few seem to grasp whether or what formal or doctrinal differences exist between “our” Muslims and the Sharia-embracing chauvinistic Muslims of Saudi Arabia, for instance.

And still, it is not American Muslims who seem to be leading the charge in advancing a new nomenclature that would readily distinguish themselves from their crazy counterparts.  Instead, it is good-hearted Americans who want so badly to believe that true Muslims, American Muslims, their Muslims, are actually more a part of American culture than some mysterious “Muslim culture.”  So we come up with words like “Islamofascism” and “radical Islam” in order to conceptually distinguish the loony Muslims from the real Muslims.  This need to make sense of the difference between the true Islam and the hijacked Islam is so strong that it played itself out on live television a couple weeks ago.  The poor ladies on The View were so overcome with their own overinflated political correctness that they walked off their own stage when Bill O’Reilly stated that “Muslims killed us on 9/11.”  The implication is obvious:  anyone describing that kind of Muslim must not fail to so designate, e.g., by using one of our neologisms like “radical Muslim.”  But why is it that Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar are leading this charge?  This, in my view, should be a bit of an embarrassment for American Muslims.

There is also the sense that American Muslims are much too measured in their condemnation of terrorism.  I grant the issue of terrorism is not often enough addressed in the broader historical, sociological, and political context that it warrants.  So when a Muslim is asked “do you condemn Hamas,” I think the reluctance to give an unequivocal “yes” owes to the fact that while terrorism is indeed awful and unforgiveable, Muslims more than ordinary Americans want to urge a level of understanding as to why it exists.  In this sense, the implication seems to be that if we strive to understand why Hamas employs terrorism, we might understand that, while it goes astray from time to time, it does not deserve to be condemned wholesale.

This is a fine academic exercise.  As an undergraduate, I studied some of the psychological and sociological causes for the rise of Nazism and the German people’s acceptance of the persecution and attempted genocide of the Jews.  But the vast majority of the time, it suffices merely to condemn Nazism and genocide as unequivocally evil and move along.  There is a causal explanation for everything if we care to look for it hard enough.  But it strikes ordinary Americans as conspicuous when their Muslim counterparts try so hard to “understand” terrorists.  It might even strike Americans as something of a duty to condemn terrorists.  The time for critical analysis and sociological inquiry can occur in another forum; when plainly asked whether one condemns an organization that employs terrorism, the answer should be, simply, “yes.”

So these were some of my take-aways from the riveting discussion today.  I think Americans would be willing to let things like the Park51 project remain the non-issues they should be, if only they had greater assurance and understanding from the American Muslim community what they are all about.  What are American Muslims thoughts on sharia?  On theocracy?  On women’s rights?  This information is available to those who seek it, but those who would seek it don’t tend to be the cranks banging on pots and pans.

All that said, here’s a pretty uplifting music video by Lena Khan, a female Muslim filmmaker.  The song is by a Muslim country singer named Kareem Salama.

Great Video About American Muslims

My friend sent me this terrific video.  Please watch.

Advice to American Muslims

I had a talk once with my Muslim friend, who was frustrated that Americans still don’t seem to accept Muslims into their culture, particularly in comparison to Jews, for example.  I suggested the first of the following suggestions below, and recently thought of some more.

1. American Muslims ought to be more upset about terrorism than anyone.  9/11 was a calculated attack against Americans, so American Muslims ought to be at least as upset as any other American.  And terrorism casts aspersions on Muslims’ religion and inhibits their acceptance into the American mainstream.  In other words, the social and psychological effects of terrorism hurt Muslims in America more than anyone else.  They ought to be leading the charge against the violence done either in the name of Islam or with its supposed blessing, by offering clear, forceful rebuttals to arguments suggesting the Koran endorses and/or mandates these atrocities.  There have been lots of wackos purporting to follow some brand of Christianity who wind up brainwashing and murdering lots of otherwise good folks.  The idea is to explain these people were off the reservation, following nothing like true Christianity and instead made up their own cockamamie doctrine, and were, well, wackos.  American Muslims need to do something similar.

Instead, a common response from American Muslims to this point has been a cool-headed psychoanalysis of terrorists, suggesting that while terrorism is to be flatly denounced, we ought to understand what has pushed them to this point.  But while there is indeed some interesting stuff here for the head-shrinkers, no one wants to hear the “I feel your pain” trope when it comes to those driving planes into our buildings yelling “Allahu Akbar.”  No one wants to talk about how we ought to peer into the subtle and complex inner workings of the terrorist mind so that we might understand his pain.  This is not to say we can’t ask those questions.  But when these sorts of sentiments dominate one’s thinking on the issue of terrorism, one comes off as entirely disengaged from the reality of the subject and wholly out of step with the rest of America.

2.  Somewhat less severe yet symbolically significant, American Muslims ought to be come out and condemn burkas. Modesty is fine.  In fact, American Muslims’ strong commitment to traditional moral values put them in the mainstream of conservative Americans.  But burkas are problematic in a number of ways.  Legally, they ostensibly pose a problem of state incursions into religious practices, such as when burka-wearers would purport to testify at trial.  There are also obvious security implications where a fashion custom prevents a person from being recognized.

Simply as a matter of custom, however, they’re weird.  At the outlet mall a couple of weeks ago I passed a couple of of burkas, who were apparently doing some shopping.  Though I couldn’t directly tell, I assumed there must have been people inside of them, judging by the general cut and surface area of the textile, and intuiting that the propulsion of a five-foot tall drape along the sidewalk at midday was best explained by positing some manner of anthropoid lurking about in the contents.  Even the little eyes peering out were difficult to discern, as the accompanying custom of burka wearers is to avoid eye contact.  (I imagine an enterprising fellow might think to introduce a periscope to the general design.)  Even diversity-loving, kumbaya-singing free spirits should be able to admit it’s off-putting.  Moreover, I am given to understand the burkas have nothing to do with Islam as a religion, but rather with certain regional customs.  Cultural tolerance is fine, but let’s encourage the home team Muslims to accelerate these new folks’ assimilation.  Americans like their beer cold, their TV loud, and their people with faces.

3. With respect to more current events, American Muslims ought to be deeply troubled that South Park and Comedy Central—the program and network who broadcast a single episode featuring the word “shit” in 162 separate instances—finally succumbed to censorship in its 201st episode, apparently due to to this warning/threat from an American convert to Islam featuring an image of the murdered and bleeding body of Theo Van Gogh.  There is something to be said for the sacking of our entertainment by those who find it easy to obtain laughs simply by pushing the envelope.  This, perhaps, is the cost of inexpensive production and distribution of culture.  (Though, I do admit, I find South Park hilarious.)  But one would like to think that it goes without saying that “culture war” is just an expression.  Aside from furthering the impression that the religion is intrinsically violent, the South Park matter just makes Islam seem deeply lame.

4. This leads to my final suggestion.  Given there are so many reasons Islam has left such a bad impression on Americans, it is lamentable that American Muslims are so uniquely awful in not only failing to seem to care about that negative impression, but that they are so disproportionately concerned with America’s relationship with Israel.  Without going into a big thing about it, I will say that I understand the skepticism over our foreign policy vis-à-vis Israel.  I read Walt and Mearsheimer’s book.  It seemed to make some sense.  But that’s neither here nor there.  No one likes a Johnny-one-note.  American Muslims need to get off the hobby horse and get concerned about some other causes, too.

[Revised.]

[UPDATE: A friend forwarded me this article, entitled “Changing the Muslim conversation.”  While it contains perfectly valid points, it is nonetheless indicative of the problems I discuss above—namely, that American Muslims are far too disengaged from the cultural and ethical battles that the rest of America takes up with boundless enthusiasm.

So why, I ask you, is Abou Talha Al-Amreeki not written off as just another lunatic? Are his blue eyes and flowing brown beard giving him credibility even though Revolution Muslim has all of 12 followers? Muslims in general and the media in particular are misdirected. The ones offended by South Park must choose their battles, no pun intended. The media, following journalistic ethics, ought to do basic homework and interview representative organisations such as CAIR, Council of American-Islamic Relations and MPAC, Muslim Public Affairs Council, or individuals of scholarly credentials such as Dr Sherman Jackson, Dr Akbar Ahmed of American University or Dalia Mogahed (former President Obama’s adviser on Muslim relations), among many others all across North America.

Incidents like South Park unnecessarily endanger us all. Together we can change that if we alter the interaction by marginalising the violent and discoursing with the deserved. And, of course, keeping response to offence in perspective.

This advice—that American Muslims’ message ought to wait on journalists getting around to talking to Muslim religious scholars and policy wonks—is precisely the opposite of what is needed.  This advice suggests that American Muslims perhaps really aren’t all that upset that Trey Parker and Matt Stone are kept from drawing Muhammad snorting coke (as they did with Buddha) or watching internet porn (as they did with Jesus).  Instead, offer up a cool, reasoned, white paper reaffirming that the official position that violence is bad, but don’t get more exercised about the whole thing than absolutely necessary.]

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

Islam Is Not Islamism

I take Krauthammer’s side in this debate with Mark Steyn regarding Geert Wilders.  In simplified terms, Wilders believes that there is no distinction between Islam and radical Islam.  Or, perhaps the difference for Wilders is between Islam and fake, watered down Islam.  I’m no scholar of Islam, so I cannot engage the debate at the level of discussing what “true” Islam is.  But I have spent a good deal of time studying what it means to have a consistent worldview, and the conclusion I’ve reached is that few if anyone has a truly and thoroughly consistent one.  And we are often faced with examples of where strict adherence to a worldview may lead to grisly results.  Christianity, or certain variations, for example, view abortion as murder, and thus might justify or even compel violence in preventing it. Obviously, most of us are thankful that adherents to such worldviews decline the urge to practice strict consistency.

Similarly, as I have suggested before (e.g., here and here), a consistently practiced purely secular worldview would lead to absolute relativism—not only on moral issues, but on every other kind of truth, be it abstract or concrete.  Now, secularists certainly don’t agree with me about that.  And this is a somewhat lofty, metaphysical debate, still carried on hopefully in good faith, and usually in the context of debates in universities or in academic journals or, ahem, in blogs.  At any rate, I certainly wouldn’t go around insisting that the rest of the world treat my position on the debate as a foregone conclusion.

I suggest the same goes for Geert Wilders.  He’s entitled to his view, but his is not a foregone conclusion, or a widely accepted conclusion, or even much of a respected conclusion.  It is still in the R&D stage, so to speak.  It may be the topic for stimulating discussion and debate on university campuses and whatnot, but one should tread awfully lightly before using it as a launching-off point for crafting new legal or social policy.

UCI’s Muslim Student Union Association Embarrasses Themselves

I have long been sympathetic to Muslims in America and in favor of a more balanced conversation when it comes to Israel and the Middle East.  All the more reason the behavior of the Muslim Student Union at UCI is such an embarrassment.

By the way, Michael Oren’s Power, Faith and Fantasy is a worthwhile primer on U.S. involvement in the Middle East.

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

Being Muslim in America Is No Picnic

A good friend of mine shared this YouTube video of 20 year old nightly news piece on his elementary school alma mater, Orange Crescent School in Garden Grove, California (“OCS”).  OCS is an Islamic school, part of the Islamic Society of Orange County, and shares a campus with the local mosque.  My friend Hassan, who appears in the piece as an adolescent, has always stressed to me that the Muslim community is very American, sharing in our values of self-reliance, hard work, virtue, and personal responsibility, and that they have long desired to become more accepted into the American culture.  Sadly for them, in the 20 years or so since this piece aired, Americans seem more wary of Muslims than ever.

The likes of Andy McCarthy and Geert Wilders characterize Islam as not a religion, but a political ideology, and that there is no such thing as “radical Islam,” but instead the atrocities we see people committing in the name of Allah are simply dutiful Muslims following the letter of the Koran.  The Fort Hood tragedy was not a freak accident—it was an inevitability given our irrational toleration of Islamic ideology.  Islam, McCarthy and Wilders would have the Western world understand, is anathema to free society.

Interestingly, Edward Gibbons, author of the seminal The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, concluded something similar about Christianity.  According to Gibbons, Christianity poisoned the pluralistic, secular fabric of the Roman empire, and instead made claims to a singular, universal Truth.  They stressed the temporal quality of the physical world, and focused on the otherworldly.  Rather than committing themselves to the protection of the Roman empire from the barbarians and swearing fealty to the emperor, Christians were committed to personal salvation and swore fealty to the God.

Edward Gibbons's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Today, by contrast, it is the view of many Americans that America is founded upon Christianity. What changed?  Not the core tenets of Christianity.  It is not Christianity’s message that determines its cultural impact. Religion and political regimes have a symbiotic relationship.  The Roman empire was pagan.  America was deistic and at least loosely Christian at its founding.  Religion—whether Christianity or Islam or just about anything else—is inherently dangerous to political systems if not suitably integrated in the respective society’s cultural fabric.

Most religions can be used to either support or tear down political society.  The culprit is not religion qua religion. We should not be so naive as to explain terrorism and anti-Americanism as the inexorable conclusion of a religious view.  And until we more fully understand the deep sociological and historiographical reasons that actually underlie modern ethnic and religious tensions, we ought to refrain from alienating that segment of our society that shares so many of our most important values and that wants to become part of our society.  Terrorism is a great evil.  We do a disservice to the cause of eradicating it by including so many false positives.

Our (Hidden) Prejudice Against the Middle East

Almost all of my reflections on the Middle East derive one way or another from conversations with a very good friend of mine who, although Indian and not Middle Eastern, is Muslim and thus attuned to potential prejudices that his fellow Americans might have with respect to the region. During our email discussion today, he suggested I read Orientalism by William Said, and gave a very good explanation why it was important.

___

Honestly, that’s what I feel that most intelligent, respectable, and well-intentioned people in this country suffer from. Even you, who I think is an exception because you have known me personally, just imagine, even you in spite of knowing me for all these years, still have a slight bit of this uneasiness (I won’t call it prejudice but I’ll just say uneasiness and insecurity… ie something doesn’t sit right with you… it’s very subconscious and that’s what makes it even more dangerous in my opinion) . So if even YOU have it, then why wouldn’t most Westerners have it way more than you? And this is where I believe that fear about not letting the Islamic world flourish or thrive comes in… that fear breeds more fear and suspicion and mistrust, and then it leads to policies of continued subjugation of the people and systematic oppression of them (or simply tacit approval of continued oppression… best example being when you stated you know some US policies aren’t right but when it came down to someone talking about actually making the changes, I think it was Ron Paul, it just didn’t sit right with you for some reason).

This is an excerpt from your email to me a few months ago:

So really this turns into an anthropological issue: what do these people believe? Why do they believe it? (And I don’t mean just about Islam: a people’s presuppositions about anything stem from their geography, climate, culture, religion, not to mention their neighbors, who are in turn influenced by all those things as well.)

The principle question that is itching me is, why exactly has the Middle East has always been a such a crucible of conflict? And while I am skeptical at the heavy handed approach, I have come to also be skeptical that the answer could be as simple as having someone like Ron Paul or Barack Obama sit down “without preconditions.” Could it all be as simple as that? And wasn’t that Jimmy Carter’s approach as well?

But maybe this is what I really should have clarified: I don’t think that any people are any better or worse than us. In fact, that’s even a useless statement in my mind, because in some ways I’m kind of a relativist. “As good as” America? “As good as” anyone else? What does that mean? That one has to have technology, progress, a certain kind of culture, a certain level of wealth? No. But many people will say that our freedom makes us good, something to be looked up to. But the philosophy of freedom has many subtleties, and the American view of it is only arguably better — again, depending on what presuppositions you bring to the table. Jean Jacque Rousseau, for example, wrote the famous line “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” The “chains” here are his own desires for control, wealth, power. We cannot be free, truly free, without being free of our evil inclinations. Later he wrote that we must be “forced to be free.” This line has been used both to criticize and praise Rousseau — again, depending on your point of view, your presuppositions.

Also this:

Again, I know very little about Iran’s government and what policies and viewpoints it actually espouses. (I.e., a rousseau-ian/hegelian view of freedom, or the Lockean/American view of individual liberty). But my point is, where I used to just give such governments the benefit of the doubt (because I thought it was so absurd that people would give their lives over to the state), I can no longer do that, because I now see that it is quite possible.

So, how can you assure me that the vast majority of Iranian people want this?

Anyways, my impression is that you view me and other Muslims like me living here in America as some kind of enlightened minority, somehow innocently detached from the “real” majority of the Muslim world and all of its cruel and brutal realities—realities that you simply cannot take any chances on and feel extremely uneasy about changing any US foreign policy status quo on. Almost as if its like a self defense mechanism… you don’t know enough about it, but you don’t want to rock the boat because what’s been happening seems to keep you and others safe and living normally so let’s not risk anything right now even if it means taking a risk that we are keeping some injustices and evils going.

So although its not a prejudice of the sorts we are used to seeing (ie racism) its another type of prejudice that starts with ignorance of the unknown and then gets strengthened by the manipulation of ideas that you have been subjected to in certain circles, which have only fed your fears and suspicions further and further.

Can you honestly feel open enough to a Muslim and Christian co-existence the way that you have been taught by the establishment to respect the “Judeo-Christian” realm? That’s the question you have to ask yourself and if you have any qualms whatsoever therein lies my point. I don’t blame you, I just want you to recognize it’s there.