The Reactionary Utopian
                     August 15, 2006


NATION-BUILDING AND ISLAM
by Joe Sobran

     "If anyone denies a verse of the Koran," says a 
verse of the Koran, "it is permissible to behead him." 
Not exactly promising for interfaith understanding, is 
it?

     I came across that in a book by a Jesuit priest 
published in 1963, long before today's tensions between 
Islam and the West. When I cited it to a liberal friend, 
he commented that it may be due to Islam's early struggle 
for survival against heavy odds, not applicable to Islam 
today.

     Well, that may explain the origins of such verses, 
and for most Muslims they may be mere vestiges, as the 
fiercer passages of the Old Testament are for most Jews 
today. But whatever gave rise to them in the first place, 
they were written into the sacred text and there they 
still stand.

     And more than a thousand years later many believers 
still take them very literally. It's no use explaining to 
such folk that the Prophet may have written them when in 
a foul mood. Whatever he wrote is, according to Islam, 
eternally true. If it seems savage to unbelievers, well, 
the will of Allah is inscrutable. Sentimental (Western) 
public opinion and human reason mean nothing. The 
believer regards them with utter contempt.

     Some people still take the Old Testament's more 
problematic words literally too, though, oddly enough, 
they are more apt to be Protestant Zionists than Jews. 
Holy books are always subject to explosive 
interpretations, never more so than now. The Middle East 
has many states, but few of them seem to be blue states.

     Even to call Islam a "religion" may be misleading, 
because the modern West separates the sacred and the 
secular so completely that hardly anything remains 
sacred. Religion has become a mere compartment of human 
existence, excluded from public life. Islam recognizes no 
such separation. Everything belongs to Allah, and woe to 
the unbeliever.

     This is a formula for mutual incomprehension and 
endless conflict. Western policymakers and diplomats have 
traditionally left religion to theologians, so recent 
developments have caught them flat-footed.

     You can't reduce something as huge as Islam to a few 
handy quotations, but we had better recognize that its 
view of the world has little in common with, say, 
Anglicanism. To take only one symptom, we seldom hear of 
Anglican suicide bombers. If such creatures exist at all, 
they aren't normative for their coreligionists, and they 
find little encouragement in even the most incendiary 
parts of the Book of Common Prayer.

     The West's response to militant Islam tends to be 
alarm and horror. It hardly has categories to describe 
it, so it falls back on such inadequate terms as 
"terrorism" and "Islamofascism," which make about as much 
sense as "Islamovegetarianism." In fact, such words don't 
get you very far at all. Fascism was a brief and 
superficial thing compared with the vast and ancient 
thing that is Islam; it flared out after a few violent 
years, in a way Islam is most unlikely to do.

     How, then, to deal with the faith of a billion 
people, which we have only recently paid any attention 
to? More cautiously, obviously, than our rulers have done 
so far, barging into the Middle East with plans of 
conquest, alias "democracy" (complete with equal rights 
for women!). We offer to supplant their old traditions 
with our latest fads, and then we are disappointed when 
they resist.

     Back in 2000, candidate George W. Bush scoffed at 
nation-building, in the wise realization that a nation 
isn't something you "build." The Communists used to speak 
of "building a new society," but they succeeded only in 
destroying most of the old one. How did Bush manage to 
forget what he once knew?

     I have no idea, but forget it he did, and his 
"global democratic revolution" is (or was; he has muted 
this theme lately) a close equivalent of the Communist 
project that survives, after a fashion, only in Cuba. If 
you would see his monument, go to Baghdad and look around 
you. The Iraq war has made the Vietnam war look like a 
smooth operation.

     Bush and his team have failed to distinguish between 
the superficial evil of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, 
which was easily toppled, and the abiding reality of an 
Islamic society, which doesn't welcome reform by 
unbelievers. By now they must be learning the difference.

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