You can pretty much be sure that when the New York Times carries an op-ed discussing either the genesis of ISIS or potential solutions to its brutality, religion will be downplayed. Well, yesterday’s op-ed by writer Aatish Taseer, called “ISIS and the return of history,” is a welcome exception, though as usual I have a few beefs with it. (I clearly have a gene for petulance).
The good part is that Taseer’s piece is pretty sensible, pointing at the rise of modernity and the hatred thereof as a cause of Muslim disaffection, and pointedly ignoring the regressive Left’s self-blaming based on Western imperialism. As he notes:
Perhaps more surprising is that in all those places where a modern nation has been grafted onto an ancient culture, history has returned with a vengeance. From Confucian China to Buddhist Myanmar to Hindu India, history has become the source of a fierce new conservatism that is being used to curb freedoms of women and stoke hatred of minorities. As the ultimate source of legitimacy, history has become a way for modernizing societies to procure the trappings of modernity while guarding themselves from its values.
Taseer’s on to something here, of course, there are a couple of problems. One is a problem of omission: why do the youths of these modern states act so disaffected? He says only that “a certain dispiriting experience of modernity, felt often as the loss of a sense of self and of old ways, exacerbates these demands. This is what lies behind this violent need to reclaim history.” But that’s not very convincing, for there are plenty of societies (China and Taiwan come to mind) that have made the transition to modernity without needing to reach back at an imagined past. To me, a better explanation is that the disaffection comes from dysfunctional societies: the kind of societies where ISIS, the Taliban, and Boko Haram arose. Modernity isn’t so dispiriting if you’ve benefited from it!
Also, Taseer’s vision of an ancient and more benign Islam may be relatively accurate, but for nonbelievers the areas it conquered were hardly the paradisiacal and multicultural society Taseer paints:
The jihadists in Syria and Iraq, Mr. McCants [William McCants, author of The ISIS Apocalypse] told me, are “infatuated” with Harun al-Rashid, the great Abbasid caliph whose court reportedly inspired “One Thousand and One Nights.” “They see him as the pinnacle of success, and the caliphate that he ruled over as the golden age,” Mr. McCants said, “but they elide all those parts of his rule that don’t mesh with their own.” The eighth-century caliph being idolized by the Islamic State practiced a far more lenient rule than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi does. Harun was tolerant of Shiites and religious minorities. His court would engage in freewheeling debates over matters of faith. “You could play musical instruments,” Mr. McCants said. “He loved to drink wine, he loved men.”
Jews and Christians in these communities (people called dhimmis) were allowed to live, and even practice their faiths (inconspiculously), but had restrictive freedom and were taxed. But let’s grant Taseer the fact that modern extremist Islamists are indeed practicing behaviors not seen in earlier parts of the Caliphate. The question is why.
And here’s where Taseer gives religion a pass, blaming “history” rather than faith. As he says, this return to the past is not unique to extremist Islam, but is present elsewhere, including Buddhist and Hindu societies:
When I was in Sri Lanka in 2013, the Bodu Bala Sena, a radical Buddhist nationalist group, had conjured up a prudish Buddha who scolded young girls about their clothes and told them what time they should be home at night. In reality, the Buddha, like many Eastern thinkers, was generally reticent on the subject of sexual morality
. . . Similarly, in India, a breach has appeared between a sensuous and liberal past and an ugly, puritanical present. In my daily reading of Sanskrit poetry, there are women with disheveled hair, half-open eyes and cheeks covered in sweat from the exertion of coitus. But turn on the television and the minister of culture, who says that the Hindu holy books are ideal texts for teaching moral values, informs modern Indians that “girls wanting a night out” may be all right elsewhere, but it is “not part of Indian culture.”
Note that in India, imperialism can’t be blamed for the rise of extremist Hinduism. That’s a fairly recent development, and the British quit India in 1947. (Note as well that Indian protests against British occupation were by and large nonviolent, and, despite pervasive poverty, India never developed a movement like ISIS. What happened during Partition was not the killing of the British, but the wholesale slaughter of Hindus and Muslims by each other, and almost entirely on the basis of religion.Trains full of Muslims were slaughtered by Hindus, for example, after the penises of males were inspected—Muslims practice circumcision and Hindus don’t.)
But, after a brief allusion to the fact that the Qur’an might be a bit nastier than other scripture in inspiring violence, Taseer still claims that the “return to history” is the main problem:
Islam, with its rich textual history and detailed recordings of the life and times of the Prophet Muhammad, offers the faithful an especially aggressive blueprint for turning the past into a weapon against the present. But the return of history is not specific to Islam. All over the old world, the spread of modernity and the wearing down of tradition have led to a frantic need to repossess the past. But this act of reclamation, through an ever-closer adherence to text without context, does not give back what was lost. It creates something radical and new — and dangerous.
But the history that Islamist and Hindu nationalists aspire to return is one soaked in religion. After all, it’s the dictates of scripture that shaped those societies, inspiring, for instance, ISIS to adhere to a literal Qur’an and behaviors derived from the hadith. The West, too, has had to cope with modernity, but hasn’t been so shaken up by “the shock of the new” that Americans long for the days of the frontier and its violence. The aspects of the past that are so odious to opponents of ISIS or Hindutva come from scripture.
I’m not saying that the secular past was all beer and skittles: as Steve Pinker argues, morality has increased most everywhere in the last five or six centuries, and bad treatment of the poor, women, and animals was simply part and parcel of society. But imagine if there was no religion—not just now, but in the past. What would regressive Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists be grasping for?
In that way Taseer manages to exculpate religion, and I don’t think he’s 100% correct. But at least he’s free from the tiresome self-blaming of the Western Left.
I don’t see how appeals to “history” are any sort of explanation at all. History is simply what happened before. How could current reality be anything BUT what happened before?
Yes. And another way of putting it: history is prophecy in reverse.
But at the same time, the “return to history” IS a return to a religious regime, since there weren’t many secular regimes in ancient times. Or if there were, no one told me about them. I read there is a minor return to the Greek gods movement. And Native Americans have returned to their historical cultures which don’t distinguish “religion” from culture/history.
So I’m not offended by the idea that they are returning to their “history” as long as it is made clear how blood (pun intended) religious their “history” was.
I have a theory (which, to quote PCC-E, is mine 🙂 ) that it is not Western imperialism which annoys the Islamic world, but rather it is simply the fact that the West is vastly more successful.
In technology the West is vastly ahead, in terms of leading universities the West is vastly ahead, in terms of wealth generation the West is vastly ahead (and the difference is narrowed only by the fact that oil sits under some Arab lands); in terms of cultures that people respect and countries that people want to migrate to, the West is vastly ahead. Really, the Islamic world is clearly backward in just about every important way.
All of this must be quite a blow to the self esteem of Muslims, who are brought up being told that Islam is the perfect and final system for mankind. Yet clearly it doesn’t work very well.
The cognitive dissonance might cause a reaction leading them to reject everything Western and turn to more and more extreme versions of their ideology, since it is either that or simply accept that Islam is a third-rate way of running a nation.
Your theory sounds reasonable to me. Jealousy can be a terrible source of upset. I think you can add to that wonderful decadence in Europe, and the US. They envy that too. Our freedoms and sexual morality is probably very disconcerting to many Muslims who were raised under a puritanical totalitarianism. Think of the Hollywood films they see that portray gallons of alcohol, acres of skin, and even banquets of pork roasts. They must be very confused to be attracted and repelled at the same time. Where do you put such frustration?
You remind me of something I was taught in Psych 101 in relation to Skinner box experiments. A food source in the centre of the box acts as a positive attractor that a pigeon will tend to approach. Energising a mesh ring on the floor around the food that shocks the bird produces avoidance behaviour.
What the experimenters found was that the bird’s behaviour would converge to where it stayed in a zone just outside the shock ring. The attraction of the food brought it in from the outer areas until the dislike of the shock reached a balance point and it then jittered back and forth in this zone.
I’m not remembering now but it was somehow determined that this was significantly stressful to the animal. There was a term used for the experiment that has also escaped memory. Attraction-repulsion or some such.
Yes, I too remember the experiment, vaguely. Maybe someone with all their neurons still functioning can hit our ‘refresh’ button.
Your theory (or perhaps here we should call it your hypothesis ;)) makes a lot of sense to me too, and I like rickflick’s addition.
http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=10072
America’s Kingdom debunks the many myths that now surround the United States’s “special relationship” with Saudi Arabia, or what is less reverently known as “the deal”: oil for security. Taking aim at the long-held belief that the Arabian American Oil Company, ARAMCO, made miracles happen in the desert, Robert Vitalis shows that nothing could be further from the truth. What is true is that oil led the U.S. government to follow the company to the kingdom. Eisenhower agreed to train Ibn Sa’ud’s army, Kennedy sent jets to defend the kingdom, and Lyndon Johnson sold it missiles. Oil and ARAMCO quickly became America’s largest single overseas private enterprise.
Beginning with the establishment of a Jim Crow system in the Dhahran oil camps in the 1930s, the book goes on to examine the period of unrest in the 1950s and 1960s when workers challenged the racial hierarchy of the ARAMCO camps while a small cadre of progressive Saudis challenged the hierarchy of the international oil market. The defeat of these groups led to the consolidation of America’s Kingdom under the House of Fahd, the royal faction that still rules today.
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http://husseini.posthaven.com/an-alternative-to-the-plo-fundamentalists
NY Times, 1989, Op Ed by Israeli military advisor:
“An Alternative to the P.L.O.-Fundamentalists”
A deep ideological gap separates Hamas and the P.L.O. Hamas holds that a Palestinian state must be Islamic with a constitution based on the Koran. The P.L.O. advocates a secular state for Palestinians and includes factions that are Marxist and atheistic. Hamas does not intend to challenge the P.L.O. until the Palestinians are free of Israeli occupation, but its leaders express no doubt that an armed clash will ultimately come.
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http://harpers.org/archive/2016/01/a-special-relationship/?single=1
Harpers, Dec. 2015
“The US is teaming up with Al Qaeda, again.”
…It was obviously something big: although the explosion had taken place on the other side of Sher Darwaza, a mountain in the center of Kabul, McWilliams had heard it clearly. After negotiating a maze of narrow streets on the south side of the city, he found the site. A massive car bomb, designed to kill as many civilians as possible, had been detonated in a neighborhood full of Hazaras, a much-persecuted minority.
McWilliams took pictures of the devastation, headed back to the embassy, and sent a report to Washington. It was very badly received — not because someone had launched a terrorist attack against Afghan civilians, but because McWilliams had reported it. The bomb, it turned out, had been the work of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahedeen commander who received more CIA money and support than any other leader of the Afghan rebellion. The attack, the first of many, was part of a CIA-blessed scheme to “put pressure” on the Soviet presence in Kabul. Informing the Washington bureaucracy that Hekmatyar’s explosives were being deployed to kill civilians was therefore entirely unwelcome.
“Those were Gulbuddin’s bombs,” McWilliams, a Rhode Islander with a gift for laconic understatement, told me recently. “He was supposed to get the credit for this.” In the meantime, the former diplomat recalled, the CIA pressured him to “report a little less specifically about the humanitarian consequences of those vehicle bombs.”
I tracked down McWilliams, now retired to the remote mountains
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Also, consider the basic theme of religion/spirituality itself:
In the beginning (or at the foundation) everything was PERFECT. We need to get back to (or down to) that unique state of perfection. The world and all its temptations — which includes reason — blocks us from this noble path.
With religion you don’t just idealize the historical past, you create and idealize a supernatural past. The religious narrative is soaked in a rejection of worldliness. And yeah, that’s going to conflict with modernity.
Human beings under stress reveal a penchant for the masochistic and suicidal emotions. The confusion and frustration of modern life can indeed be resolved by complete submission to sadistic totalitarianism or simply eliminating the self in a puff of smoke.
“The West, too, has had to cope with modernity, but hasn’t been so shaken up by “the shock of the new” that Americans long for the days of the frontier and its violence.”
Um, yes. Yes they do, at least a considerable minority made up of whites who haven’t benefited, or don’t feel they have benefited, from progressive policies and increased civil rights. They really do want to go back. What do you think the whole gun ownership obsession is about? Not to mention the various secessionist movements? They want to live in a frontier world where you were boss of your homestead, and if you beat your wife, used your children as slaves on the farm, and killed Indians or black people, nobody looked too closely. They really miss those days.
Sounds very Republican…
Yes, it’s a conservative impulse.
And if you take the not so ancient text of the second amendment it kills on a regular basis. Of course this is from the hip, I only have the mass shootings of innocents as an observation but it too (2nd Amendment) seemingly is an outmoded piece of crap that needs an over haul.
Off subject, sorry about that.
+1
Is it religion or the return of history?
Is it one group expanding its territory, its resources, its access to women. The far more base motive of man the animal challenge more our self image than the lefts obsession with ‘signalling’ its moral superiority by demanding submissive behaviour of itself!
For many of them, this would have to be a vicarious lack of benefit. A notable number of terrorists have either been born and raised in the West and live the same lives most of us live, are from privilege in Middle Eastern countries, or some hybrid (e.g. born in the Middle East, attend college in the West).
Maybe one feels the dysfunction of the Islamic states of the world especially when you are able to get away from those places and see the difference. Even though you might personally be benefiting from modernity, the people you know and identify with, family, people who look and talk like you, are not. You can either repudiate the culture of the people you know, or you can double down and see the difference as a sign of oppression, of theft, of injustice perpetrated from the outside.
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It’s not about history. They don’t really study history. It’s about control.
These “leaders” don’t point to a real past. It’s always a “glorious” past. And then they proffer visions of an immortal future. They seek to alienate people from their present lives.
Why do religious restrictions often focus on questions of food and sex? Because if they can control and conform these nearly uncontrollable drives and impulses, they know they have you. Let the tithing begin!
They aren’t really trying to unite you with god. They seek to divide you from yourself.
Muslim prayer rules also disturb sleep.
Excellent point.
I am surprised Atish Taseer still thinks kindly of Islam. His own father was assassinated for opposing Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.
When all inquisitiveness, criticism is suppressed and even dangerous, adhering to scriptures from a time when life was subject to feast or famine, little knowledge of the anatomy, disease and natural science, subject to the beneficence of overlords that control your genetic fitness at a whim I dare say losing one self to the will of Allah is a good way to explain your miserable existence.
But the current batch of epithetic deficient individuals have no such excuse. They are simply moronic thugs doing what all religious pancakes do these days, cherry pick the ‘good’ bits to feel at ease with themselves, as with ISIS, this means acting out fantasies in glorious tribute to their testosterone fuelled delusion. Violence and power being an anaphrodisiac for delusional psychopaths and the easy lead indoctrinated minions follow.
The delusion is complete, the past history whatever that is, is the future and for them, there is no distinction.
You say:”Imperialism can’t be blamed for rise of extremist Hinduism”. Sure. But there is a small problem- the problem of vocabulary. Suppose you add ‘Christian’ to Imperialism, would it make a difference? I would think so. I am not justifying Hindu extremism but what I am trying to point out is that I am unable to understand the the use of such words as ‘West’,’Europe’ ‘US’ when the opposite party being contrasted with is always either Hindu India, Muslim East or Buddhist South East. Instead, why not Christian West,Christian Europe or Christian America for to be seen fair in all such narrative.
However, the opposite party is often Christian Russia. For some years it was also Christian Serbia.
Good one, Cant ignore without commenting after seen the “Bodu Bala Sena” issue. I think even though majority of Sinhala Buddhist have a little bit of BBS gene in them, somehow they managed to send the government which supported BBS home last year. The chief thug who run this organization been visiting some Europe countries as well as US before he come to limelight. first he was targeting evangelical christian groups but later they move on muslim. I will not say there are direct involvement but there can be some because I saw the pattern and how it changed. The rulers that time did not wasted a good disaster.
By the way I enjoy your forum very much.
Theocratic exceptionalism with narcissistic fantasies of messianic heroism. Object relations theory, misplaced aggression, compensatory adaptation for sexual repression, and redemption through self-immolation. You know the chicken at Trotsky’s? Yes. It’s worse.
It reminds me of the American Civil War. Things are usually done for more than one reason. The South wanted States Rights to trump Federal rights. But the number one right they wanted was slavery.
The whole “states rights” thing is a giant canard. The south only was interested in state rights to maintain and expand slavery. They were opposed to states rights when northern states passed laws prohibiting the return of fugitive slaves who had managed to escape. In that case they wanted the federal government to enforce their “property rights”.
fwiw… I do know that apostrophes belong in possessive nouns. 😉 (Where is that “edit” button when you need it?)