This too, may be a little harsh for our sensibilities....but then again...maybe not. Certainly something to think about.
Resentment as a religion
November 25, 2001
Marian Kester Coombs
The questions of the hour are "Is Islam the problem?" and "If so, then what
is Islam?" The West had been waiting for the formidable Salman Rushdie — a
man who has been living under a "fatwa" a few years longer than the rest of
us — to weigh in, and he did so in early November, answering the question
"Is it Islam?" with a resounding yes.
Islam, he noted, unlike Christianity, is a petrified belief structure that
has never undergone any sort of Reformation since its inception in the
seventh century; its most modern self-critique consists of 18th-century
Wahhabism, a fundamentalist, puritanical, theocratic reaction to the
"corruption of the true faith" which has now found its most perfect
incarnation in the Taliban.
Another man who should know, expatriate Iranian author and journalist Amir
Taheri, also begs us to blame Islam. "The refusal to subject Islam to
rational analysis" — anathema to believers — "is a recipe for further
fanaticism," wrote Mr. Taheri in the Wall Street Journal on Oct. 27.
"All but one of the world's remaining military regimes are in Muslim
countries. With the exception of Turkey and Bangladesh, there are no real
elections in any Muslim country. Of the current 30 active conflicts in the
world no fewer than 28 concern Muslim governments and/or communities.
Two-thirds of the world's political prisoners are held in Muslim countries,
which also carry out 80 percent of all executions each year."
Islam should be critiqued not as a belief system but as "an existential
reality," argues Mr. Taheri, one that prevents Muslim nations "from
developing a modern political culture, without which they cannot reform
their societies and rebuild their economies."
Nick Griffin is a British National Party politician who just shocked the
U.K. establishment by winning 16.4 percent of the general election vote in
Oldham, a town in the north of England where Muslim riots and attacks on
white Britons have become epidemic. He was in the States the other day to
warn Americans what is in store for us as the "clash of civilizations" gets
up-close and personal.
Mr. Griffin has made a study of Islam and finds it to be not a religion, in
the sense of requiring some sort of moral response from the believer, but
rather a tendency, in the political sense of a faction contesting for power.
The Koran, which he likens to "the Talmud on angel dust," instructs
believers living in "infidel" nations to lay low until they reach about 10
percent of the population; then they may attack and disrupt the sinful host
society with a better chance of ultimate takeover.
With a birthrate of six children per woman in contrast to the native British
rate of 1.7, Muslims are massing to hit that critical percentage in Britain
very soon. In France they are already there, and Muslim unrest, from gangs
assaulting French girls to machine-gun attacks on police stations, has been
steadily increasing. Mr. Griffin warns that the European experience has
destroyed any illusions about Muslim assimilation of the West. Official
protestations to the contrary, they are here not to assimilate, but to
conquer.
What is the wellspring of this implacable enmity? We know its history:
briefly, the repulsion of the Mohammedan armies by Charles the Hammer near
Tours in 732 A.D., the attack on Jerusalem by the First Crusade in 1099 and
the Crusades that followed, the Cid's exploits in the 12th century,
Ferdinand and Isabella's expulsion of the Moors from most of Spain in 1492,
Phillip III's reconquest of Granada and the remaining Moor-held Spanish
provinces in 1609, the halt of the Ottoman Empire's forces at the gates of
Vienna in 1683, the Ottoman collapse after World War I.
But what keeps Islam's appetite for conflict with "Christendom" ever
whetted? After all, Spain no longer simmers vengefully over England's rude
reception of the Armada, nor are the Dutch still spoiling for a rematch over
the East Indies. Islam does not move on because for some reason it cannot.
Shelby Steele wrote "War of the Worlds" for the Wall Street Journal of Sept.
17 a stirring ode to Western civilization in which he declared, "It has
always astounded me how much white Americans take for granted the rich and
utterly decisive heritage of Western culture," and warned that "White guilt
morally and culturally disarms the West [and] only inflames the narcissism
of the ineffectual" Third World. Later, one Sajid Ali Khan opined from
London that "Greek civilization was fortunately translated into Arabic and
thence percolated into 'the West.' And so on so forth. For instance do his
heroic paler-skinned not all use Arabic numerals? The Arab al-gibr gives
rise to algebra in the most recent spelling, and also to the sort of
gibberish with which Mr. Steele is haunted."
Preferring not to dwell on the peculiarities of Mr. Khan's opinion, Jed
Skillman opined back from Brookfield, Ill., that he had missed the point:
"It's true the West has adopted the use of Arabic numerals. It happened some
time ago and it's not news. I think the point is that no one thinks of
himself as 'acting Arabic' for doing so." In other words, algebra was a long
time ago — what have you done for us lately?
Explaining why the Arab world, once a center of learning and scientific
inquiry, had lost momentum to the West by around 1500, Pakistani physicist
Pervez Hoodbhoy noted mildly in the New York Times on Oct. 30: "The notion
that all knowledge is in the Great Text [Koran] is a great disincentive to
learning." Arab scholars may have preserved and translated the treasures of
Greek science, keeping them alive to be passed later to Europeans, and
collaborated on the invention of zero and the decimal system, but they could
not sustain the social conditions necessary to the search for scientific
truth.
Because Islamic states are theocratic, they dare not encourage theoretical
inquiries and technological innovations that would tend to produce strains
in what should be a perfect and immutable God-ordained system. And because
the Islamic motivation to do science is only religious, the kind of
disinterested, open-ended "pure" science that has so benefited the world is
rarely pursued.
One also need not be a Friedan feminist to see how the lowly status of
Muslim women permits an unhealthy psychic base of unearned male supremacism.
Chivalry, another innovation unique to the West, was a deliberate drive by
European men to reform masculinity and to honor women qua women. Muslim
polygamy, likewise, creates a large pool of "undomesticated" and
disenfranchised men ripe for recruitment to fanaticism, while Western
monogamy has worked to offer each man a peaceful democratic stake in society
(cf. the writings of Kevin MacDonald).
One of the nastier features of globalization is how every culture is now
forced to compare itself to every other. No more do the veiling effects of
time and distance mercifully render "mysterious" the brutish everyday
realities of more backward peoples. For those who once were great and now
are way behind, the glare of global invidious comparison is particularly
unbearable.
Not a contemporary but nonetheless a highly modern voice is that of
Friedrich Nietzsche, the "posthumous" man who inhabited a world post-God and
beyond Good and Evil. His critique of ressentiment — the "self-poisoned
mind" of resentment — fits Islam like a glove. For Nietzsche, the repressed
emotion of ressentiment leads at length to an entire falsified worldview, a
whole revalued code of values, a complete morality based upon sour grapes,
vindictiveness, delusions of grandeur and an embittered sense of helpless
inferiority. The envied enemy is hated for his superior virtues, which are
transformed by the alchemy of ressentiment into objects of loathing.
Sociologists also distinguish between two types of juvenile deviant
behavior: criminality which aims at direct personal gain, and delinquency
which targets symbols such as schools and churches. This distinction
accounts for the strong element of vandalism — sheer malicious joy in
destroying — that is so striking in the current terrorist campaign; Islam is
collective, ethnic ressentiment expressing itself in the attempted wholesale
vandalization of Western society.
The "Son of Sam" defense ("My dog made me do it") has now been joined by the
"Son of Islam" defense ("My god made me do it"). Gods, dogs — as long as you
can relocate the will to kill and maim outside yourself in some higher
power, you're righteous. Right?
Before September 11, Americans who reacted against the many hate-filled
threats and insults directed at our country were labeled "paranoid" and
instructed to blithely ignore such provocations. Now the media squeak in
wonderment at "how naive we all were," and scold us to hurry up and worry
about everything under the sun.
Meanwhile, London's Sunday Telegraph reports that our close trading
partners, the Chinese, by the thousands are snapping up garish videos of the
September attack with narration like "This is the America the whole world
has wanted to see," and "Look at the panic in their faces as they wipe off
the dust and crawl out of their strong buildings — now just a heap of
rubble. We will never fear these people again, they have been shown to be
soft-bellied paper tigers."
Please let us know when it's no longer "paranoid" to react to these little
digs, OK?
Marian Kester Coombs is a free-lance writer.
washtimes.com |
