This afternoon I took a break (ice water though - not coffee for a change) and while looking for some topic (I honestly don't even remember what the original topic of research was!) I clicked and clicked and found myself skimmed an article called "When Islam Breaks Down" by Theodore Dalrymple.
Before I knew it I was not skimming... I was immersed. I was seeing in my creative mind the faces of people, places and things he was discussing in his article. I was sucked in and reading it and thoroughly thought it was wonderfully written.
As I got to the bottom of the article I was going to quickly read a few of the comments only to see... there weren't any.
WHAT? How in the heck could this article not have any comments? A hot topic today, well written, with real people, stories, emotions and feelings... not one comment? I went back up to the top of the page to see where the article I was reading was even from (because I clicked into the article itself, not the parent site) and that is when I saw the date; 2004. Ahhh.
I was going to tweet a link to it just because I found it very interesting reading, but only having about 1200 followers, that wasn't really going to get it 'out there'. Instead I decided to feature it on Coffee Talking and because I found it incredibly interesting to read, I decided to put it all here instead of a just a snippet; and giving FULL AND LOUD CREDIT and linkage to the original source below. I think it's well written and more people should read it. Hopefully having it on a couple different sites instead of buried in the 2004 archives of just one site, will bring a few more eyes to it.
When Islam Breaks Down
What the West can learn from the Muslim youths who throng my city’s prisons.
Spring 2004
My first contact with Islam was in
Afghanistan. I had been through Iran overland to get there, but it was
in the days of the Shah’s White Revolution, which had given rights to
women and had secularized society (with the aid of a little detention,
without trial, and torture). In my naive, historicist way, I assumed
that secularization was an irreversible process, like the breaking of
eggs: that once people had seen the glory of life without compulsory
obeisance to the men of God, they would never turn back to them as the
sole guides to their lives and politics.
Afghanistan was different, quite clearly a pre-modern society. The
vast, barren landscapes in the crystalline air were impossibly romantic,
and the people (that is to say the men, for women were not much in
evidence) had a wild dignity and nobility. Their mien was aristocratic.
Even their hospitality was fierce. They carried more weapons in daily
life than the average British commando in wartime. You knew that they
would defend you to the death, if necessary—or cut your throat like a
chicken’s, if necessary. Honor among them was all.
On the whole I was favorably impressed. I thought that they were
freer than we. I thought nothing of such matters as the clash of
civilizations, and experienced no desire, and felt no duty, to redeem
them from their way of life in the name of any of my own civilization’s
ideals. Impressed by the aesthetics of Afghanistan and unaware of any
fundamental opposition or tension between the modern and the pre-modern,
I saw no reason why the West and Afghanistan should not rub along
pretty well together, each in its own little world, provided only that
each respected the other.
I was with a group of students, and our
appearance in the middle of a country then seldom visited was almost a
national event. At any rate, we put on extracts of
Romeo and Juliet
in the desert, in which I had a small part, and the crown prince of
Afghanistan (then still a kingdom) attended. He arrived in Afghanistan’s
one modern appurtenance: a silver convertible Mercedes sports car—I was
much impressed by that. Little did I think then that lines from the
play—those of Juliet’s plea to her mother to abrogate an unwanted
marriage to Paris, arranged and forced on her by her father,
Capulet—would so uncannily capture the predicament of some of my Muslim
patients in Britain more than a third of a century after my visit to
Afghanistan, and four centuries after they were written:
Is there no pity sitting in the clouds
That sees into the bottom of my grief?
O sweet my mother, cast me not away!
Delay this marriage for a month, a week,
Or if you do not, make the bridal bed
In that dim monument where Tybalt lies.
How often have I been consulted by young Muslim women patients,
driven to despair by enforced marriages to close relatives (usually
first cousins) back “home” in India and Pakistan, who have made such an
unavailing appeal to their mothers, followed by an attempt at suicide!
Capulet’s attitude to his refractory daughter is precisely that of my Muslim patients’ fathers:
Look to’t, think on’t, I do not use to jest.
Thursday is near, lay hand on heart, advise:
And you be mine, I’ll give you to my friend;
And you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets,
For by my soul, I’ll ne’er acknowledge thee,
Nor what is mine shall ever do thee good.
In fact the situation of Muslim girls in my city is even worse than
Juliet’s. Every Muslim girl in my city has heard of the killing of such
as she back in Pakistan, on refusal to marry her first cousin, betrothed
to her by her father, all unknown to her, in the earliest years of her
childhood. The girl is killed because she has impugned family honor by
breaking her father’s word, and any halfhearted official inquiry into
the death by the Pakistani authorities is easily and cheaply bought off.
And even if she is not killed, she is expelled from the household—
O sweet my mother, cast me not away!—and regarded by her “community” as virtually a prostitute, fair game for any man who wants her.
This pattern of betrothal causes suffering
as intense as any I know of. It has terrible consequences. One father
prevented his daughter, highly intelligent and ambitious to be a
journalist, from attending school, precisely to ensure her lack of
Westernization and economic independence. He then took her, aged 16, to
Pakistan for the traditional forced marriage (silence, or a lack of open
objection, amounts to consent in these circumstances, according to
Islamic law) to a first cousin whom she disliked from the first and who
forced his attentions on her. Granted a visa to come to Britain, as if
the marriage were a bona fide one—the British authorities having turned a
cowardly blind eye to the real nature of such marriages in order to
avoid the charge of racial discrimination—he was violent toward her.
"Granted a visa to come to Britain,
as if
the marriage were a bona fide one—
the British authorities
having turned a
cowardly blind eye to the
real nature of such marriages
in order to
avoid the charge
of racial discrimination"
She had two children in quick succession, both of whom were so
severely handicapped that they would be bedridden for the rest of their
short lives and would require nursing 24 hours a day. (For fear of
giving offense, the press almost never alludes to the extremely high
rate of genetic illnesses among the offspring of consanguineous
marriages.) Her husband, deciding that the blame for the illnesses was
entirely hers, and not wishing to devote himself to looking after such
useless creatures, left her, divorcing her after Islamic custom. Her
family ostracized her, having concluded that a woman whose husband had
left her must have been to blame and was the next thing to a whore. She
threw herself off a cliff, but was saved by a ledge.
I’ve heard a hundred variations of her emblematic story. Here, for
once, are instances of unadulterated female victimhood, yet the silence
of the feminists is deafening. Where two pieties—feminism and
multiculturalism—come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is
an indecent silence.
Certainly such experiences have moderated
the historicism I took to Afghanistan—the naive belief that monotheistic
religions have but a single, “natural,” path of evolution, which they
all eventually follow. By the time Christianity was Islam’s present age,
I might once have thought, it had still undergone no Reformation, the
absence of which is sometimes offered as an explanation for Islam’s
intolerance and rigidity. Give it time, I would have said, and it will
evolve, as Christianity has, to a private confession that acknowledges
the legal supremacy of the secular state—at which point Islam will
become one creed among many.
That Shakespeare’s words express the despair that oppressed Muslim
girls feel in a British city in the twenty-first century with much
greater force, short of poisoning themselves, than that with which they
can themselves express it, that Shakespeare evokes so vividly their
fathers’ sentiments as well (though condemning rather than endorsing
them), suggests—does it not?—that such oppressive treatment of women is
not historically unique to Islam, and that it is a stage that Muslims
will leave behind. Islam will even outgrow its religious intolerance, as
Christian Europe did so long ago, after centuries in which the Thirty
Years’ War, for example, resulted in the death of a third of Germany’s
population, or when Philip II of Spain averred, “I would rather
sacrifice the lives of a hundred thousand people than cease my
persecution of heretics.”
My historicist optimism has waned. After all, I soon enough learned
that the Shah’s revolution from above was reversible—at least in the
short term, that is to say the term in which we all live, and certainly
long enough to ruin the only lives that contemporary Iranians have.
Moreover, even if there were no relevant differences between
Christianity and Islam as doctrines and civilizations in their ability
to accommodate modernity, a vital difference in the historical
situations of the two religions also tempers my historicist optimism.
Devout Muslims can see (as Luther, Calvin, and others could not) the
long-term consequences of the Reformation and its consequent secularism:
a marginalization of the Word of God, except as an increasingly distant
cultural echo—as the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the once
full “Sea of faith,” in Matthew Arnold’s precisely diagnostic words.
And there is enough truth in the devout Muslim’s criticism of the
less attractive aspects of Western secular culture to lend plausibility
to his call for a return to purity as the answer to the Muslim world’s
woes. He sees in the West’s freedom nothing but promiscuity and license,
which is certainly there; but he does not see in freedom, especially
freedom of inquiry, a spiritual virtue as well as an ultimate source of
strength. This narrow, beleaguered consciousness no doubt accounts for
the strand of reactionary revolt in contemporary Islam. The devout
Muslim fears, and not without good reason, that to give an inch is
sooner or later to concede the whole territory.
This fear must be all the more acute among
the large and growing Muslim population in cities like mine. Except for a
small, highly educated middle class, who live de facto as if Islam were
a private religious confession like any other in the West, the Muslims
congregate in neighborhoods that they have made their own, where the
life of the Punjab continues amid the architecture of the Industrial
Revolution. The halal butcher’s corner shop rubs shoulders with the
terra-cotta municipal library, built by the Victorian city fathers to
improve the cultural level of a largely vanished industrial working
class.
The Muslim immigrants to these areas were not seeking a new way of
life when they arrived; they expected to continue their old lives, but
more prosperously. They neither anticipated, nor wanted, the inevitable
cultural tensions of translocation, and they certainly never suspected
that in the long run they could not maintain their culture and their
religion intact. The older generation is only now realizing that even
outward conformity to traditional codes of dress and behavior by the
young is no longer a guarantee of inner acceptance (a perception that
makes their vigilantism all the more pronounced and desperate). Recently
I stood at the taxi stand outside my hospital, beside two young women
in full black costume, with only a slit for the eyes. One said to the
other, “Give us a light for a fag, love; I’m gasping.” Release the
social pressure on the girls, and they would abandon their costume in an
instant.
Anyone who lives in a city like mine and
interests himself in the fate of the world cannot help wondering
whether, deeper than this immediate cultural desperation, there is
anything intrinsic to Islam—beyond the devout Muslim’s instinctive
understanding that secularization, once it starts, is like an
unstoppable chain reaction—that renders it unable to adapt itself
comfortably to the modern world. Is there an essential element that
condemns the Dar al-Islam to permanent backwardness with regard to the
Dar al-Harb, a backwardness that is felt as a deep humiliation, and is
exemplified, though not proved, by the fact that the whole of the Arab
world, minus its oil, matters less to the rest of the world economically
than the Nokia telephone company of Finland?
I think the answer is yes, and that the problem begins with Islam’s
failure to make a distinction between church and state. Unlike
Christianity, which had to spend its first centuries developing
institutions clandestinely and so from the outset clearly had to
separate church from state, Islam was from its inception both church and
state, one and indivisible, with no possible distinction between
temporal and religious authority. Muhammad’s power was seamlessly
spiritual and secular (although the latter grew ultimately out of the
former), and he bequeathed this model to his followers. Since he was, by
Islamic definition, the last prophet of God upon earth, his was a
political model whose perfection could not be challenged or questioned
without the total abandonment of the pretensions of the entire religion.
But his model left Islam with two intractable problems. One was
political. Muhammad unfortunately bequeathed no institutional
arrangements by which his successors in the role of omnicompetent ruler
could be chosen (and, of course, a schism occurred immediately after the
Prophet’s death, with some—today’s Sunnites—following his
father-in-law, and some—today’s Shi’ites—his son-in-law). Compounding
this difficulty, the legitimacy of temporal power could always be
challenged by those who, citing Muhammad’s spiritual role, claimed
greater religious purity or authority; the fanatic in Islam is always at
a moral advantage vis-à-vis the moderate. Moreover, Islam—in which the
mosque is a meetinghouse, not an institutional church—has no
established, anointed ecclesiastical hierarchy to decide such claims
authoritatively. With political power constantly liable to challenge
from the pious, or the allegedly pious, tyranny becomes the only
guarantor of stability, and assassination the only means of reform.
Hence the Saudi time bomb: sooner or later, religious revolt will depose
a dynasty founded upon its supposed piety but long since corrupted by
the ways of the world.
The second problem is intellectual. In the West, the Renaissance, the
Reformation, and the Enlightenment, acting upon the space that had
always existed, at least potentially, in Christianity between church and
state, liberated individual men to think for themselves, and thus set
in motion an unprecedented and still unstoppable material advancement.
Islam, with no separate, secular sphere where inquiry could flourish
free from the claims of religion, if only for technical purposes, was
hopelessly left behind: as, several centuries later, it still is.
The indivisibility of any aspect of life from any other in Islam is a
source of strength, but also of fragility and weakness, for individuals
as well as for polities. Where all conduct, all custom, has a religious
sanction and justification, any change is a threat to the whole system
of belief. Certainty that their way of life is the right one thus
coexists with fear that the whole edifice—intellectual and
political—will come tumbling down if it is tampered with in any way.
Intransigence is a defense against doubt and makes living on terms of
true equality with others who do not share the creed impossible.
Not coincidentally, the punishment for apostasy in Islam is death:
apostates are regarded as far worse than infidels, and punished far more
rigorously. In every Islamic society, and indeed among Britain’s Muslim
immigrants, there are people who take this idea quite literally, as
their rage against Salman Rushdie testified.
The Islamic doctrine of apostasy is hardly
favorable to free inquiry or frank discussion, to say the least, and
surely it explains why no Muslim, or former Muslim, in an Islamic
society would dare to suggest that the Qu’ran was not divinely dictated
through the mouth of the Prophet but rather was a compilation of a
charismatic man’s words made many years after his death, and
incorporating, with no very great originality, Judaic, Christian, and
Zoroastrian elements. In my experience, devout Muslims expect and demand
a freedom to criticize, often with perspicacity, the doctrines and
customs of others, while demanding an exaggerated degree of respect and
freedom from criticism for their own doctrines and customs. I recall,
for example, staying with a Pakistani Muslim in East Africa, a very
decent and devout man, who nevertheless spent several evenings with me
deriding the absurdities of Christianity: the paradoxes of the Trinity,
the impossibility of Resurrection, and so forth. Though no Christian
myself, had I replied in kind, alluding to the pagan absurdities of the
pilgrimage to Mecca, or to the gross, ignorant, and primitive
superstitions of the Prophet with regard to jinn, I doubt that our
friendship would have lasted long.
The unassailable status of the Qu’ran in Islamic education, thought,
and society is ultimately Islam’s greatest disadvantage in the modern
world. Such unassailability does not debar a society from great artistic
achievement or charms of its own: great and marvelous civilizations
have flourished without the slightest intellectual freedom. I myself
prefer a souk to a supermarket any day, as a more human, if less
economically efficient, institution. But until Muslims (or former
Muslims, as they would then be) are free in their own countries to
denounce the Qu’ran as an inferior hodgepodge of contradictory
injunctions, without intellectual unity (whether it is so or not)—until
they are free to say with Carlyle that the Qu’ran is “a wearisome
confused jumble” with “endless iterations, longwindedness,
entanglement”—until they are free to remake and modernize the Qu’ran by
creative interpretation, they will have to reconcile themselves to
being, if not helots, at least in the rearguard of humanity, as far as
power and technical advance are concerned.
A piece of pulp fiction by Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle, first published in 1898, when followers of the charismatic
fundamentalist leader Muhammad al-Mahdi tried to establish a theocracy
in Sudan by revolting against Anglo-Egyptian control, makes precisely
this point and captures the contradiction at the heart of contemporary
Islam. Called
The Tragedy of the Korosko, the book is the story
of a small tourist party to Upper Egypt, who are kidnapped and held to
ransom by some Mahdists, and then rescued by the Egyptian Camel Corps.
(I hesitate, as a Francophile, to point out to American readers that
there is a French character in the book, who, until he is himself
captured by the Mahdists, believes that they are but a figment of the
British imagination, to give perfidious Albion a pretext to interfere in
Sudanese affairs.) A mullah among the Mahdists who capture the tourists
attempts to convert the Europeans and Americans to Islam, deriding as
unimportant and insignificant their technically superior civilization: “
‘As to the [scientific] learning of which you speak . . . ’ said the
Moolah . . . ‘I have myself studied at the University of Al Azhar at
Cairo, and I know that to which you allude. But the learning of the
faithful is not as the learning of the unbeliever, and it is not fitting
that we pry too deeply into the ways of Allah. Some stars have tails . .
. and some have not; but what does it profit us to know which are
which? For God made them all, and they are very safe in His hands.
Therefore . . . be not puffed up by the foolish learning of the West,
and understand that there is only one wisdom, which consists in
following the will of Allah as His chosen prophet has laid it down for
us in this book.’ ”
This is by no means a despicable argument. One of the reasons that we
can appreciate the art and literature of the past, and sometimes of the
very distant past, is that the fundamental conditions of human
existence remain the same, however much we advance in the technical
sense: I have myself argued in these pages that human
self-understanding, except in purely technical matters, reached its
apogee with Shakespeare. In a sense, the mullah is right.
But if we made a fetish of Shakespeare (much richer and more profound
than the Qu’ran, in my view), if we made him the sole object of our
study and the sole guide of our lives, we would soon enough fall into
backwardness and stagnation. And the problem is that so many Muslims
want both stagnation and power: they want a return to the perfection of
the seventh century and to dominate the twenty-first, as they believe is
the birthright of their doctrine, the last testament of God to man. If
they were content to exist in a seventh-century backwater, secure in a
quietist philosophy, there would be no problem for them or us; their
problem, and ours, is that they want the power that free inquiry
confers, without either the free inquiry or the philosophy and
institutions that guarantee that free inquiry. They are faced with a
dilemma: either they abandon their cherished religion, or they remain
forever in the rear of human technical advance. Neither alternative is
very appealing; and the tension between their desire for power and
success in the modern world on the one hand, and their desire not to
abandon their religion on the other, is resolvable for some only by
exploding themselves as bombs.
People grow angry when faced with an
intractable dilemma; they lash out. Whenever I have described in print
the cruelties my young Muslim patients endure, I receive angry replies: I
am either denounced outright as a liar, or the writer acknowledges that
such cruelties take place but are attributable to a local culture, in
this case Punjabi, not to Islam, and that I am ignorant not to know it.
But Punjabi Sikhs also arrange marriages: they do not, however, force
consanguineous marriages of the kind that take place from Madras to
Morocco. Moreover—and not, I believe, coincidentally—Sikh immigrants
from the Punjab, of no higher original social status than their Muslim
confrères from the same provinces, integrate far better into the local
society once they have immigrated. Precisely because their religion is a
more modest one, with fewer universalist pretensions, they find the
duality of their new identity more easily navigable. On the 50th
anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, for example, the Sikh temples
were festooned with perfectly genuine protestations of congratulations
and loyalty. No such protestations on the part of Muslims would be
thinkable.
But the anger of Muslims, their demand that their sensibilities
should be accorded a more than normal respect, is a sign not of the
strength but of the weakness—or rather, the brittleness—of Islam in the
modern world, the desperation its adherents feel that it could so easily
fall to pieces. The control that Islam has over its populations in an
era of globalization reminds me of the hold that the Ceausescus appeared
to have over the Rumanians: an absolute hold, until Ceausescu appeared
one day on the balcony and was jeered by the crowd that had lost its
fear. The game was over, as far as Ceausescu was concerned, even if
there had been no preexisting conspiracy to oust him.
One sign of the increasing weakness of
Islam’s hold over its nominal adherents in Britain—of which militancy is
itself but another sign—is the throng of young Muslim men in prison.
They will soon overtake the young men of Jamaican origin in their
numbers and in the extent of their criminality. By contrast, young Sikhs
and Hindus are almost completely absent from prison, so racism is not
the explanation for such Muslim overrepresentation.
Confounding expectations, these prisoners display no interest in
Islam whatsoever; they are entirely secularized. True, they still adhere
to Muslim marriage customs, but only for the obvious personal advantage
of having a domestic slave at home. Many of them also dot the city with
their concubines—sluttish white working-class girls or exploitable
young Muslims who have fled forced marriages and do not know that their
young men are married. This is not religion, but having one’s cake and
eating it.
The young Muslim men in prison do not pray; they do not demand halal
meat. They do not read the Qu’ran. They do not ask to see the visiting
imam. They wear no visible signs of piety: their main badge of
allegiance is a gold front tooth, which proclaims them members of the
city’s criminal subculture—a badge (of honor, they think) that they
share with young Jamaicans, though their relations with the Jamaicans
are otherwise fraught with hostility. The young Muslim men want wives at
home to cook and clean for them, concubines elsewhere, and drugs and
rock ‘n’ roll. As for Muslim proselytism in the prison—and Muslim
literature has been insinuated into nooks and crannies there far more
thoroughly than any Christian literature—it is directed mainly at the
Jamaican prisoners. It answers their need for an excuse to go straight,
while not at the same time surrendering to the morality of a society
they believe has wronged them deeply. Indeed, conversion to Islam is
their revenge upon that society, for they sense that their newfound
religion is fundamentally opposed to it. By conversion, therefore, they
kill two birds with one stone.
But Islam has no improving or inhibiting effect upon the behavior of
my city’s young Muslim men, who, in astonishing numbers, have taken to
heroin, a habit almost unknown among their Sikh and Hindu
contemporaries. The young Muslims not only take heroin but deal in it,
and have adopted all the criminality attendant on the trade.
What I think these young Muslim prisoners
demonstrate is that the rigidity of the traditional code by which their
parents live, with its universalist pretensions and emphasis on outward
conformity to them, is all or nothing; when it dissolves, it dissolves
completely and leaves nothing in its place. The young Muslims then have
little defense against the egotistical licentiousness they see about
them and that they all too understandably take to be the
summum bonum of Western life.
Observing this, of course, there are among Muslim youth a tiny
minority who reject this absorption into the white lumpenproletariat and
turn militant or fundamentalist. It is their perhaps natural, or at
least understandable, reaction to the failure of our society, kowtowing
to absurd and dishonest multiculturalist pieties, to induct them into
the best of Western culture: into that spirit of free inquiry and
personal freedom that has so transformed the life chances of every
person in the world, whether he knows it or not.
Islam in the modern world is weak and brittle, not strong: that
accounts for its so frequent shrillness. The Shah will, sooner or later,
triumph over the Ayatollah in Iran, because human nature decrees it,
though meanwhile millions of lives will have been ruined and
impoverished. The Iranian refugees who have flooded into the West are
fleeing Islam, not seeking to extend its dominion, as I know from
speaking to many in my city. To be sure, fundamentalist Islam will be
very dangerous for some time to come, and all of us, after all, live
only in the short term; but ultimately the fate of the Church of England
awaits it. Its melancholy, withdrawing roar may well (unlike that of
the Church of England) be not just long but bloody, but withdraw it
will. The fanatics and the bombers do not represent a resurgence of
unreformed, fundamentalist Islam, but its death rattle.
