Western views on Islamic violence

Happy New Year, everybody!

This article was on cnn.com a few days ago. It's a terribly tragic story, but I think really significant that this type of story is getting front page coverage.

First, it shows a young terrorist-in-training getting untrained.

When I think of the West's reaction to terrorism, I usually think of a few main common threads. A political thread focuses on fighting and/or preventing terror tactics. This is the basic 9/11-never-again reaction, and encompasses people of both or neither of the next two.

A second thread found among Christians talks about the inherent violence of Islam, and I'm not sure what comes after that, except maybe something about fighting their tactics as in Camp A - a strategy which may or may not be conflated with a half tongue-in-cheek reference to the Crusades.

(A third camp exists among modern agnostics and sees all religions as inherently violent, to the point of being surprised to meet normal nonviolent people who are devoutly religious. Their inability to make distinctions about or even talk about religion seriously is a handicap, since most of the earth's population does take seriously the human inclination toward religion. This explains a large chunk of failures in US foreign and especially public diplomacy.)

Neither of the first two common ways of speaking says much about fighting the recruitment of the great cultural threat that is (hm, what to call it exactly...) violent Islamism.

There are efforts being undertaken to counteract the main patterns of terrorist recruitment of young, idle Muslim teens full of passion and promise but also resentment and frustration and deprived of a decent liberal education (in the classical sense of "liberating"); but these efforts are not enough, and for some reason the coverage of them is even less.

The CNN article was interesting secondly because it mentions an organized program of undoing terrorist brainwashing being conducted by nonviolent Muslims. Now, many of you conservatives are convinced that Islam will always be violent by nature. This may be true on some levels, but here are some not-fully developed thoughts on whether Christians should even care about that internal Muslim debate:

1. If you are convinced of the truth of Christianity and the divine mission of Christ, or even the divine selection of Israel, then you must believe that all other religions are of merely human origin. At least, this is the traditional claim of Christianity--that it was in fact founded by God Himself. So if less and less Muslims view the violent passages of the Quran literally, isn't this a good thing, regardless of whether WE think it is a less pure form of Islam? Seriously, if Islam is only a human institution, as Christians regard it, then the humans that hold it have as much authority to say what is its most essential or best or purest form. Arguably, they have more authority than we do.

2. Christianity traditionally is not a completely pacifist religion, which is to say it has a limited place for violence. It has a theory of just war that is more nuanced than just saying "War is always wrong." There are strong currents of support for the theoretical morality of capital punishment (abstracted from the practical difficulties of assuring guilt, or the call for mercy, which is at the same time essential to and higher than the basic concept of justice). There is certainly a strong appreciation for the necessity for social order and a state with the power to police wrongdoing.

Moreover, when it comes to abstract things like occasions of sin and vice, the Christian tradition is just full of violent and military analogies. We are encouraged to make appropriate distinctions like "hating the sin, not the sinner." (I've always thought C.S. Lewis' Perelandra presented the best concrete example of righteous hatred legitimately acted upon.) We are counseled to root out without mercy anything that is keeping us from holiness and perfection - even our own hand, if necessary.

This is a widely acknowledged spiritual principle: Just look at Jacob wrestling with the angel and earning the name Israel ("struggles with God"); St. Paul exhorting us to "fight the good fight"; and the strong tradition in Islam that remembers that "Islam" is related to salam, "peace," and sees jihad ("struggle") as primarily a spiritual one.

So what, you ask? Well, first of all violence on the spiritual level is still violence, since it indicates the existence of evil (something that deserves our hatred and our struggles against it). And spiritual realities very rarely avoid having effects or manifestations in the physical world. So while we can't eradicate the concepts of injustice or the slaughter of innocents, we can and sometimes are obligated to fight instances of them that we see. And if spiritual realities are considered higher or greater, spiritual evils are more evil than physical evils, which suggests a way to justify things like (a) sacrifice for something greater than oneself and (b) using proportionate physical violence to counter a force that seeks to cause great(er) physical or spiritual evil.

Practically speaking, then, I suggest that saying that Islam is a violent religion is at best unhelpful, and at most meaningless, especially if it comes someone who believes Islam does not originate from the one immutable God. For if it is truly a human institution, it by nature can change, and we can only pray for Muslims that their understanding of their religion will change for the better, with God's help. More useful is to say that person or group X is fighting the wrong fight, not to criticize that they are willing to fight for something at all. Thus I think that other religions are in a better position to dialogue with Islam than areligious western modernism.

3. Of course, if Islam is not merely a human phenomenon, then certain things follow from that, too, mostly to do with the fact that its truest form wouldn't contradict other things that God has authored, like human nature and especialy human reason. This is probably the essence of Pope Benedict's controversial 1996 speech in Regensburg: That any religion that is actually good for humans must be above all reasonable in the sense of founded on reason. (Not in the social sense of "Oh, be reasonable" which half the time just means "Don't rock the boat". Benedict obviously wasn't afraid to rock the boat.) Benedict wants us, but mostly Muslims, to look at Islam in terms of how it can respect, improve, and raise up human nature and human reason. The primary goal of this need not be to induce Muslims to reject Islam so much as to reject strains of it that may be deemed unreasonable. This is a good strategy, and for all the protests he received from the Muslim world, it is the nonviolent, rational Muslims that continue to dialogue with him, since they share more common ground: not just religious ground like honoring Abraham as spiritual father, but even more basic, human ground. If Islam is seen and practiced in a way that truly makes one a better person, we cannot be afraid to praise and support that.