Huff, Puff, and Blow

Or, not all wolves are big and bad. Some are small-minded and smug and work in educational bureaucracies in Britain.

A story based on the Three Little Pigs has been turned down from a government agency's annual awards because the subject matter could offend Muslims.

The digital book, re-telling the classic fairy tale, was rejected by judges who warned that "the use of pigs raises cultural issues".

Becta, the government's educational technology agency, is a leading partner in the annual schools award.

The judges also attacked Three Little Cowboy Builders for offending builders.

The book's creative director, Anne Curtis, said that the idea that including pigs in a story could be interpreted as racism was "like a slap in the face".

The CD-Rom digital version of the traditional story of the three little pigs, called Three Little Cowboy Builders, is aimed at primary school children.

But judges at this year's Bett Award said that they had "concerns about the Asian community and the use of pigs raises cultural issues".

... The feedback from the judges explaining why they had rejected the CD-Rom highlighted that they "could not recommend this product to the Muslim community".

They also warned that the story might "alienate parts of the workforce (building trade)".

The judges criticised the stereotyping in the story of the unfortunate pigs: "Is it true that all builders are cowboys, builders get their work blown down, and builders are like pigs?"

U.N. Decides It Doesn't Suck Enough

[posted by Callimachus]

Votes to Suck More.

GENEVA (AP) — Islamic countries pushed through a resolution at the U.N. Human Rights Council on Friday urging a global prohibition on the public defamation of religion — a response largely to the furor last year over caricatures published in a Danish newspaper of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.

The statement proposed by the Organization of Islamic Conference addressed what it called a "campaign" against Muslim minorities and the Islamic religion around the world since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.

The resolution, which was opposed by a number of other non-Muslim countries, "expresses deep concern at attempts to identify Islam with terrorism, violence and human rights violations."

It makes no mention of any other religion besides Islam, but urges countries "to take resolute action to prohibit the dissemination of racist and xenophobic ideas and material aimed at any religion or its followers that constitute incitement and religious hatred, hostility, or violence."

(And don't miss this).

Acid Tests

[posted by Callimachus]

Dean Esmay lays down a fatwa on anti-Islamic commentary:

Simply put, you must agree to all of the following assumptions:

1) Islam does not represent the forces of Satan or the Anti-Christ bent on destruction of the Christian world.

2) There is no 1,400 year old "war with the West/Christianity" being waged by Muslims or anyone else.

3) Islam as a religion is no more inherently incompatible with modernity, minority rights, women's rights, or democratic pluralism than most religions.

4) Medieval, anachronistic, obscure terms like "dhimmitude" or "taqiyya" are suitable for polite intellectual discussion. They are not and never will be appropriate to slap in the face of everyday Muslims or their friends.

5) Muslims have no more need to prove that they can be good Americans, loyal citizens, decent people, or enemies of terrorism than anyone else does.

I don't suspect this was meant to be heckled in a courtroom, but I do think #3 is open to discussion. A big religion is a mansion with many rooms; people who inhabit it will make it over to suit themselves, and you can find the full range of passions and perversions under the cloak of any religion on earth.

But to note the human consistency is not to say all religions are equally susceptible to certain trends, or that some do not devote more coherent effort to turning their adherents aside from -- or toward -- one or another of the dark qualities in our nartures.

Number 5? No, nobody "needs" to prove anything. On the other hand, I always feel myself somehow representing one thing or another that I am. If I were to put a bumper sticker on my car that says "Vote for X," I'd feel obligated to drive well, lest people think, "People who support X are road hogs who don't use turn signals." When I go abroad, or meet a foreign visitor here, I feel I represent America in some small way.

Again, it's not mandatory, but it's the kind of quality that keeps people behaving better than they otherwise might. It helps lubricate the wheels of social intercourse.

And you expect people to test you. When I go to Europe, I'm aware of the stereotypes people likely have of Americans. I used to drink with a crowd where I was the only one who had been to college. If I didn't know someone well, they often seemed to be reserved around me, as if expecting I would judge something they said as stupid or uneducated. I made sure never to even seem to be doing that, and part of their ribbing me about reading too many books, etc., was to put everyone at ease in some minor way.

So, no, nobody needs to be or prove anything. But it's not a banning crime to, say, read the large and consistent body of theological writing in Islam that agrees it is the obligatory personal duty of Muslims to fight any non-Muslim invader of traditional Muslim-ruled lands, and then wonder how this affects your fellow citizens who happen to be Muslims in the current state of the world. If you don't get all in everyone's face about it.

It seems to me his #4 gets to the problem: The same ingredients can be used to have a polite debate, or to form a rhetorical stink bomb. It's all in the attitude and the intention. And sometimes those things aren't so clear. Banning certain views is like banning "aluminum" on airline flights, because knives and guns are made of aluminum.

Tariq Ramadan

[posted by Callimachus]

Ian Buruma's extensive profile of Tariq Ramadan is behind the NYT firewall. Clive Davis, however, picks up on a couple of its essential points. "Ramadan's anti-capitalist politics sound pretty unreconstructed in a 1968 sort of way. That said, Buruma emphatically clears him of anti-semitism:"

Ramadan is in fact one of the few Muslim intellectuals to speak out against anti-semitism. In an article in Le Monde, he wrote: "We have heard the cries of ‘down with the Jews!’ shouted during protest demonstrations, and reports of synagogues being vandalized in various French cities. One also hears ambiguous statements about Jews, their secret power, their insidious role within the media, and their nefarious plans. ... Too rarely do we hear Muslim voices that set themselves apart from this kind of discourse and attitude."

Which is nice. It would be even nicer if he wrote it in Arabic-language media in the Middle East instead of Le Monde. By now, we ought to be alert to the tendency of some controversial voices to say one thing to the West and another to their friends, counting on us being too lazy to translate. But in Ramadan's case, it seems unlikely he could have been printed at all in many Muslim Middle Eastern nations. The governments keep an eye on the media, and his views (and his person) are not exactly welcomed there.

Back to Davis, whose next point dovetails with mine above, and I suspect he was reading Buruma's piece with the same baloney detector in hand: "As for those notorious comments about stoning, well, I'm not sure the explanation is all that convincing. But read the whole piece and decide for yourself:"

[Nicolas] Sarkozy accused Ramadan of defending the stoning of adulterers, a punishment stipulated in the section of the Islamic penal code known as huddud. Ramadan replied that he favoured "a moratorium" on such practices but refused to condemn the law outright. Many people, including Sarkozy, were outraged. When I talked with Ramadan in London, the mere mention of the word "stoning" set him off on a long explanation.

"Personally," he said, "I’m against capital punishment, not only in Muslim countries, but also in the U.S. But when you want to be heard in Muslim countries, when you are addressing religious issues, you can’t just say it has to stop. I think it has to stop. But you have to discuss it within the religious context. There are texts involved. I am not just talking to Muslims in Europe, but addressing the implementation of huddud everywhere, in Indonesia, Pakistan and the Middle East. And I’m speaking from the inside to Muslims. Speaking as an outsider would be counterproductive.

Meanwhile, you can read Ramadan himself here. My opinion of it? He wants to talk a good game of inclusion and mutual respect:

I have attempted to show that one can be entirely European, or American, and Muslim (that is why I have written my books in Western languages). We all possess multiple identities, and we must, as a matter of necessity, put forward the values we share with our Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, and atheist fellow citizens of our secularized societies. ... We must turn our backs on a vision that posits "us" against "them" and understand that our shared citizenship is the key factor in building the society of the future together. We must move forward from integration — simply becoming a member of a society — to contribution — to being proactive and offering something to the society.

Yet once again, he's writing for the West, and not saying these things to the vast majority of Muslims in the world who don't read "Western languages." And the rest of his article is not at all about what we all can learn about one another and our common humanity, but about what the West can, should, and must learn specifically about Islam.

Seeking out what Muslims love, how they love, and the nature of their aspirations can be the beginning of a difficult but respectful encounter. Far from political debates and politicians, that encounter brings us back to the essentials: learning how to respect the feelings, the loves, and the complexities of those who do not share our faith, nor our entire memory, but with whom we must build a future together.

One would think -- and hope -- that's a two-way street. I'm not convinced Ramadan does.

I think it's foolish of the U.S. to keep Ramadan out of the country and to prevent him from teaching here based on the evidence so far presented against him. I'm for letting him in, letting him say as much as he wants to say, and letting people form their own conclusions. It's the American way.

What a Tangled Web

[posted by Callimachus]

Ingrid Robeyns, writing at Crooked Timber observes that in the Netherlands, civic-run "playgroups" are offered for little tykes accompanied by a parent or guardian. But, apparently, only adult women are allowed. "Apparently," she writes, "the justification is that otherwise mothers from certain ethnic minorities [read: fundamentalist Muslim immigrant enclaves], where gender segregation is an important issue, would not attend with their children" if adult men were there.

Ingrid self-identifes as a feminist and as a liberal-egalitarian, and she's standing right in the middle of the modern European crossroads where they collide. It's a perplexing place.

What should we think about such policies? In principle, I would strongly condemn such policies, since they are plainly discriminating fathers, grandfathers, and male babysitters. In practice, I can appreciate the underlying goal of offering mothers from social groups where opposite-sex parental activities are entirely out of the question more options to socialise, and also the social and developmental benefits for their children; but it does restrict the options of more progressive heterosexual couples to equally shared parenthood, let alone the options of gay fathers and single fathers.

And she manages to torture herself down off the fence on the side of "this is on the whole a bad thing."

Please note that this is anecdotal. That it is official policy is neither confirmed nor denied throughout the comments thread (64 as of this count), which kind of makes me wonder about a site that prides itself on intellectual rigor. I'd think they would want to have that "true or false" bit nailed down before the mooing starts.

Instead, the commenters often seem more concerned with parsing finer and finer degrees of "progressivism," shaving it so thin you can see right through it and then stacking it up in a sandwich for blatantly regressive prejudices to devour.

This, frankly, is the kind of thing that drives troglodyte liberals like me up the wall. And it clearly makes a lot of the Crooked Timber regulars feel a bit queasy to be cannibalizing one of their values to feed another.

The "pluralist" justification for illiberal behavior gets a full airing:

Sometimes good europeans (of the laicist streak) are so adamant about everyone being open, that they close themselves off to perfectly legitimate forms of cultural difference.

Ingrid herself puts it like this:

I guess the feminist in me is upset with this playground denying access to fathers. The liberal-egalitarian in me tries to find justifications for why it may be defensible in terms of the benefits to the worst-off or to liberal toleration. I suppose the feminist in me is stronger than the liberal-egalitarian – at least in this case.

One commenter justifies exclusion of fathers based on "women coming along who’d suffered domestic violence or for other reasons wanted a ‘safe space’ and would have felt uncomfortable talking about personal matters with men present."

I can therefore see justifications for having some groups which are women-only, but I think there should also be ones which clearly encourage fathers as well. In fact there might even be advantages if there are groups which are specifically encouraging and targetting men as well as women.

There seems to be a consensus for this answer: "How about dividing the spaces in two, and having one half of the space devoted to mother-only, and the other space to mixed playgroups?" ... "And there should be groups for young fathers too, since they might feel more comfortable talking among themselves." ... "i agree that two types of spaces – one woman-only and one for both – certainly seems like the better idea." ... "In short, there can be legitimate reasons to discriminate, but the effects of such self-discrimination should be roughly proportional to those reasons—ie, not too intrusive on the rights of everyone else."

It takes a while, but finally someone gets to the nut of this fondness for separate-but-equal: "Is this case really any different from the argument (which I believe actually existed at the time) that U.S. schools shouldn’t be racially integrated because that might harm the children of white parents who would stop sending them to public schools?"

Another commenter hits the other nail on the head:

I think it would be better to apply the tools we use to think about creationism in the schools .... Arranging an educational institution in what to liberal/progressive/rationalist types seems like the “obvious” way is deeply troublesome for religious fundamentalists: it makes them uncomfortable, it challenges their faith, it publicizes a lack of public respect for the scientific implications of extreme fundamentalist beliefs, and it may cause marginal members and families to deconvert.

While another writes, "if it could be proven that a large group of white racists existed who would not attend job training programs unless those programs were racially segregated, would this justify the use of government money to fund racially segregated programs?"

One commenter even brings up the strange word principle:

Ingrid’s point is that this is basically a good idea; but it’s a pity we can’t sign up to it because concerns for progressive heterosexual couples, single fathers, gay men, etc. That’s just feeble. This form of segregation is wrong in principle, irrespective of its impact on these groups, and we should not go along with it. Confronting these ideas will do much more good than colaborating with them.

Which draws a response, in which "principles" is given scare quotes.

It seems to me that there are two liberal approaches. One is to simply condemn gender segregation. The other is to work with the communities/groups involved and try to get them to change their minds. This is a less ‘principled’ approach, but seems to me to have more potential than demonisation. If you want to use the racism comparison, it’s the difference between condemning white people in a particular area as racist and working with them to try and persuade them that the BNP (or other racist parties) are not the answer to their problems.

Which, as we all know, is the typical response of "progressive" groups to such problems: Don't demonize those impoverished, undereducated Southern white segregationist folks; don't glorify yourselves as Freedom Riders: Go down to the lodge halls and roadhouses and talk it over with those misguided good ol' boys. Open their eyes to their errors.

It's a good discussion, even if, if you're like me, reading a lot of what is said is a painful reminder of why you can't call the left home anymore. In the end, this comment gets closest to the truth of the thing:

Because liberalism is the politicisation of the abhorrence of cruelty, good liberals aren’t happy to see either well-established kindnesses or deep cultural identities trampled. But if liberalism is taken seriously under the definition I offered, it may very well be that these are both sensible prices to pay for the long-run aim of greater inclusion in lesser cruelty.

That's a small excerpt from a large comment. Nick Lowe put it more succinctly: "You gotta be cruel to be kind." The comment goes round and round and comes out here:

So, in this case, assuming that the liberal ideal will include a genuine and pervasive gender equality, which I think is well-established (hence the difficulty of this issue), what’s the best policy for bringing that about? Might it not turn out to be setting gender equality aside in particular areas of social life where doing so strongly conduces to its long-term realisation overall?

Yes, admit that sometimes you have to burn the village to save it. And you can't apply rules meant for angels or the logic of philosophers in a world where people kill their sisters for sleeping with the wrong boys.

Maybe the saddest thing of all is that it takes better than 53 comments before someone asks, what about the children?

I think this is horrible. What about children who want their fathers to come with them—they have to have less time with their fathers because some other people are scared of men? If the women are so offended, they can stand around in a circle with their backs turned. Or they can go home.

What, indeed? In the end what hurts the serious and thoughtful discussion most is that it was so fixated on its own ethical contortions that it forgot there were real, live children in the room.

"Like I Was a Flea"

[posted by Callimachus]

I read Bruce Bawer's book, "While Europe Slept," last year and posted thoughts about it here. I thought it was an interesting book, and a bracer if you already agreed with the premise. But it wasn't a strongly sourced book, or one you could use to build a convincing argument for the sake of someone who didn't agree with it.

What I didn't realize, till I was told by my betters, is that it was racist and Islamophobic.

The rage and the snide began when one Eliot Weinberger saw Bawer's book on a list of nominees for the National Book Critics Circle award. Weinberger was on the list last year for his collection of essays titled “What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles.” One can imagine he and Bawer don't share a common view of the world or the relative importance of the things going on in it.

The resulting stir within the usually well-mannered book world spiked this week when the president of the Circle’s board, John Freeman, wrote on the organization’s blog
(bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com): “I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer’s ‘While Europe Slept,’ " he wrote. “It’s hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia.”

Well, is it phobia if they're really out to get you? Bawer's book is mainly anecdotal. His experience living in Amsterdam and Oslo makes his observations there the most trenchant part of the book. He speaks the languages, he has walked the streets. He writes of what he's seen firsthand. I doubt either Weinberger or Freeman has had that experience.

When he lived here in the U.S., Bawer was a thoughtful New York liberal, eloquently critical of the shortcomings and excesses in American society and skeptical of the government, but without crossing the line into blind anti-Americanism. He was especially frustrated by the rising voices of the religious right and its focus on homosexuality.

In 1990s Amsterdam he found a society where he could live openly as who he was, establish a sanctioned relationship with a same-sex partner, walk down the street without fear of being hassled, and turn on a TV without seeing some politician or preacher railing against him -- this amid placid canals that ran out to rural villages full of warm people and inviting bike paths. Oh, I know how he felt. I was there years before, and even without the sexual angle, it seemed as close to paradise on earth as anything you'd hope to see.

So he settled in Amsterdam. Later he fell in love with a Norwegian and moved to Oslo. But Europe wasn't paradise on earth. Its media and elites reflexively rejected American ways and liberal democracy. The EU, and many of the countries in it, are run by an elite professional political class that he compares at one point to the old feudal aristocracy. What passes for media coverage of America is a brutal caricature, with anything that might reflect well on Americans or our culture or society scrubbed out and every negative quality pumped up.

People were kind and polite, but it was considered no rudeness for them to harrangue Americans to their faces about how wicked and evil they were. And while Europe thought America was its problem, it had a problem of its own that it refused to face.

[H]e encountered large, rapidly expanding Muslim enclaves in which women were oppressed and abused, homosexuals persecuted and killed, 'infidels' threatened and vilified, Jews demonized and attacked, barbaric traditions (such as honor killing and forced marriage) widely practiced, and freedom of speech and religion firmly repudiated.

The European political and media establishment turned a blind eye to all this, selling out women, Jews, gays, and democratic principles generally—even criminalizing free speech—in order to pacify the radical Islamists and preserve the illusion of multicultural harmony. The few heroic figures who dared to criticize Muslim extremists and speak up for true liberal values were systematically slandered as fascist bigots. Witnessing the disgraceful reaction of Europe’s elites to 9/11, to the terrorist attacks on Madrid, Beslan, and London, and to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bawer concluded that Europe was heading inexorably down a path to cultural suicide.

So if the freedom of living his identity was the lure that drew him to Europe, it was the first casualty in the local battles in the clash of civilizations. Bawer would be the first to tell you, Jerry Falwell didn't want him to get married, but that wasn't even in the same league as wanting to stone him to death. Bawer tells several incidents he can describe firsthand of gays beaten and molested by mobs of Muslim youths on the streets of European cities while onlookers do nothing and police are ineffective.

In retrospect, the surprise isn't that Bawer himself eventually was lumped in with the "fascist bigots." It's that it took this long.

Revive la France

[posted by Callimachus]

Christian Delacampagne, a professor of French literature and philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, writes about Robert Redeker, a small-town French high-school philosophy teacher who published an op-ed article in "Le Figaro" responding to the controversy over Pope Benedict's remarks about Islam. Redeker wrote of Islam’s attempt “to place its leaden cloak over the world.”

If Jesus was “a master of love,” he wrote, Muhammad was “a master of hatred.” Of the three “religions of the book,” Islam was the only one that overtly preached holy war. “Whereas Judaism and Christianity are religions whose rites reject and delegitimize violence,” Redeker concluded, “Islam is a religion that, in its own sacred text, as well as in its everyday rites, exalts violence and hatred.”

Having been posted online, the article was read all across France and in other countries as well, and was quickly translated into Arabic. Denunciations of Redeker’s “insult of the prophet” spread across the Internet. Within a day after publication, the piece was being condemned on al Jazeera by the popular on-air preacher (and unofficial voice of Osama bin Laden) Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi. In Egypt and Tunisia, the offending issue of Le Figaro was banned.

As for Redeker himself, he soon received a large number of threats by letter and e-mail. On an Islamist website, he was sentenced to death in a posting that, in order to facilitate a potential assassin’s task, also provided his address and a photograph of his home. Fearful for himself and his family, Redeker sought protection from the local police, who transferred the case to the national counter-espionage authorities. On their advice, Redeker, his wife, and three children fled their home and took shelter in a secret location. Since then, they have moved from city to city, at their own expense, under police protection. Another teacher has been appointed by the French Ministry of Education to replace Redeker, who will probably never see his students again.

It spirals downward from there. Delacampagne's lament is not over the Islamic reaction (or the lack of an audible counter-view from that community), which may say as much as anything about the state of the world. It is for the general reaction of the French elite class. I'm glad to say André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy spoke up for fundamental French liberties. As did, to his credit, Dominique de Villepin.

But the vast majority of responses, even when couched as defenses of the right to free speech, were in fact hostile to the philosophy teacher. The Communist mayor of Saint-Orens-de-Gameville, echoed by the head of Redeker’s school, deplored the fact that he had included his affiliation at the end of the article. France’s two largest teachers’ unions, both of them socialist, stressed that “they did not share Redeker’s convictions.” The leading leftist human-rights organizations went much farther, denouncing his “irresponsible declarations” and “putrid ideas.” A fellow high-school philosophy teacher, Pierre Tévanian, declared (on a Muslim website) that Redeker was “a racist” who should be severely punished by his school’s administration. Even Gilles de Robien, the French minister of education, criticized Redeker for acting “as if he represented the French educational system”—a bizarre charge against the author of a piece clearly marked as personal opinion.

Among members of the media, Redeker was scolded for articulating his ideas so incautiously. On the radio channel Europe 1, Jean-Pierre Elkabach invited the beleaguered teacher to express his “regret.” The editorial board of Le Monde, France’s newspaper of record, characterized Redeker’s piece as “excessive, misleading, and insulting.” It went so far as to call his remarks about Muhammad “a blasphemy,” implying that the founder of Islam must be treated even by non-Muslims in a non-Muslim country as an object not of investigation but of veneration.

To be sure, Redeker’s language had not been gentle. But since when has that been a requirement of intellectual discourse in France? One can often find similarly strong language in, say, Les Temps Modernes, the journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and on whose editorial board Redeker has long served. Yet, to judge by the response to his “offense,” large sectors of the French intellectual and political establishment have carved out an exception to this hard-won tradition of open discussion: when it comes to Islam (as opposed to Christianity or Judaism), freedom of speech must respect definite limits.

How did France reach this point?

He goes on to give an answer. I urge you to read it.

Couple Questions

[posted by Callimachus]

Keith Ellison made history in the nation's capitol Thursday, becoming the first Muslim member of Congress and punctuating the occasion by using a Quran once owned by Thomas Jefferson during his ceremonial swearing-in.

To which I say, great! And take that, Saudi Arabia! Take that bin-Laden! Take that al-Jazeera (which as of right now is mute on the story, a sure sign that the incident will elevate the U.S. in the eyes of the Muslim world, if that world ever learns about it). I hope the world was watching. Ellison just may have done more good for the American image than any single other citizen in the past year.

But I do wonder about something. As a gesture and a PR coup, Ellison used the Quran from Thomas Jefferson's collection. According to the Washington Post, "Jefferson's copy is an English translation by George Sale published in the 1750s ...."

But when I studied Islam I was given to understand that the Arabic language is an essential part of the sanctity of the book, and the divine miracle of its composition prevents there being a translation. Muslims worldwide, no matter their native language, pray and recite in Arabic. Some, I am told, even reject the use of the word "translation" in reference to a Quran not in Arabic.

This academic site, among others, seems to support this conclusion:

Note that any translation of the Qur'an immediately ceases to be the literal word of Allah, and hence cannot be equated with the Qur'an in its original Arabic form.

So, was Ellison really sworn in on the holy book of Islam after all?

Here's another point I haven't seen addressed in the big media coverage. Much has been made of Virgil Goode, the Virginia representative who has volunteered to be the inevitable point man for bigotry in this story. The WaPo (and others) delight in the Jefferson connection the two men now share: "Goode, who represents Jefferson's birthplace of Albemarle County, had no comment yesterday."

But Ellison was an African-American long before he was a Muslim. And Jefferson, as is known to anyone who pays attention to modern historians, is stuck in the PC doghouse as a man who bought and sold African-Americans as slaves and who lived well of their labor. The two-volume Quran translation that passed through Jefferson's hands and into Ellison's was bought with the stolen labor of, perhaps, some of Ellison's ancestors.

Personally, I find all that sort of Monday morning moralizing dreary and distracting. But it's been popular with certain circles that, perhaps, are celebrating Ellison's inauguration into Congress today. Maybe -- just maybe -- the fact that they forgot to bring it up this time means they're willing to get over it.

In that case, there's perhaps more than meets the eye in this swearing-in ceremony.

Ellison's mother, Clida Ellison, said in an interview that she thought the controversy was good, "because many people in America are going to learn what the diversity of America is all about."

Moderate Muslims

[posted by Callimachus]

Courtesy of Ali Eteraz, I learn of this fascinating survey of Muslims.

They sorted them out into "moderates" and "radicals" using a crude, but probably effective, fork:

Respondents who said 9/11 was unjustified (1 or 2 on a 5-point scale, where 1 is totally unjustified and 5 is completely justified) are classified as moderates. Respondents who said 9/11 was justified (4 or 5 on the same scale) are classified as radicals. The data for this poll were obtained during 2005-06 from Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. Approximately 1,000 in-home interviews were conducted in each country. The sampling mix of urban and rural areas is the statistical equivalent of surveying each nation’s adult population, with a statistical sampling error rate of +/- 3 percent.

The survey also asked whether "Religion [is] an important part of your daily life" and whether you "Attended religious service in last 7 days."

To both questions, slightly more moderates than radicals answered "yes." Surprised? I was.

Radicals had better education (44% secondary school-through-university, opposed to 38% for moderates). They reported more likely to have "above average or very high" incomes. And they were more optimistic: 53% thought they would be "better off" in 5 years, as opposed to 44% of moderates.

But it's also possible to look at the survey's margin of error and see that most of the differences of opinion and behavior between radicals and non-radicals fall within it. Moderates and radicals seem to view the West about the same, both in what they find to admire (technology, followed by democracy) and what they think it needs to do better ("respect Islam," "refrain from imposing beliefs").

What does it mean? The difference between Islamic radicals and moderates -- except that the radicals are richer and better-educated -- seems to lie outside the scope of the questions asked, which were the ones I generally assumed separated one class from the other.

Or else there's really not important distinction between them except how they choose, or are compelled by quirks of personality, to act on their faith.

Give Them Enough Pope

[posted by Callimachus]

In my dissipated youth I had a friend who collected Catholic theology jokes. I was able to add only a few minor gems to his Smithsonian of sacrilege, but one of them was a story Hume told of a new non-European convert to Christianity.

He had been taught all the dogmas of the faith and accepted baptism and been given his first sacrament. The next day, the priest approached Benedict, for this was his new name, and grilled him again in the basics, to see if they had stuck.

Priest: How many gods are there?

Benedict: None.

Priest: How now? None!

Benedict: Yes. You told me there only was one god. And yesterday I eat him.

I don't have to go out very far into blogland to know I'll meet many "Benedicts" of the joke writing about Benedict the pope and his speech last week. Not one in a thousand who are commenting on it actually read the furshlugginer speech or attempted more than a superficial understanding of it. They are content to let the "New York Times" tell them what the Pope said and meant. Big mistake.

On the Muslim side, comments on the thread of the al Jazeera article are enlightening, and depressing. Here are photos and a description of a protest outside a Catholic church in Britain.

The delicious paradox of "We will kill you for saying we are violent" has been noted. I also see people who demand respect for their religion reacting by disrespecting others' faiths. It makes me wonder whether the respect they seek is the respect of a peer for a peer or that of a subordinate for a master.

The Pope is raising an interesting question here: Whether reason ought to have a part in religion. Shortly after the "offensive" passage he sets the dialogue in the context of his big question:

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry.

He eventually will reverse the terms of the question and assert emphatically that religion has a role in reason.

The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them.

We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

Of course to introduce this idea he picks Manuel II Paleologus -- a Byzantine emperor, "shaped by Greek philosophy" -- and not a Catholic theologian. If he had wanted to make an official slam against Islam he easily could have picked a relevant quote from something within the dogma of the Church. Everyone seems to have overlooked this detail. The Pope quoting a "non-Catholic" Greek in a university speech is about as dogmatic as would be his quoting Louis Armstrong.

Meanwhile many bloggers will confuse the historical realities of Christianity and Islam, as human constructions, with their natures as revealed religions. As a skeptic of both, damned by both, perhaps I can be of some help.

* * *

So, even if it wasn't the Pope's point, what about this "spreading religion by the sword" business? Are both faiths equally guilty of it, as some would say?

Christians found an empire in place and captured control of it. From that perch they could take their time making the change. At times they employed the same state violence against the polytheists that the Roman state had employed against the Christians a few generations earlier.

But they also had the luxury of letting the influence of power, combined with priestly persuasion, sincere conversions, and the persuasive influence of miracle stories, do their work on the people. Any individual conversion of a Roman citizen to Christianity is likely to have had many aspects. But awareness of the social and material benefits of joining the dominant religion certainly played a role in many of them.

The fall of the Empire which soon followed the conversion brought on a new crisis, but the Christians generally were able to bring in the new barbarian warlords by making Christianity part of the package deal of Roman-ity, along with law, order, competent bureaucracy, technological efficiency, and writing.

Again, once you had the bosses in the faith, the people inevitably would follow. The same pattern prevailed when the Church expanded out of its Roman Empire geographical base into Northern Europe. Bring in the kings and queens by the power-and-wealth lure of dynastic marriages, then once you have your foot in the door, and the power of the government behind you, work on the people.

In many cases they exploited a systemic weakness in the resistance of polytheism to monotheistic virus: By allowing the pagans to accept the new god at first as one among many, as they had been accustomed to embracing new gods before, the Christians got a foot in the temple, where they soon expelled all the "idols."

The priests of the old faith could be an impediment, as could the women who held high roles as healers and teachers and workers of magic. And they often paid for it with their lives. In some cases, as in Ireland, much of the priestly class made such a smooth transition to the same role in the new faith it was not entirely clear who had converted whom. But a people that clung to its polytheism (often for nationalistic reasons), such as the Saxons or the Lithuanians, might be subject to large-scale violence -- the sword of the metaphor.

Islam came up in a different world, from a lowlier origin. Arabs were the outsiders, the equivalent of the Goths who overran Rome. There was no Rome for them, but a fragmented, overlay of ancient civilization. In bringing their control over these technologically superior but generally decadent lands, the Muslims from the desert fought bloody military campaigns. Religious rigor helped them avoid the typical fate of a conqueror of a larger, older civilization, of being absorbed into it. Often the Muslims imposed harsh terms on the defeated, and polytheists always risked the sword.

But Muslim leaders also often made generous use of the concepts like "People of the Book" that allowed them to leave other faiths intact, if subordinate. In fact, whereas adherence to accepted forms of Christianity was the sole path to power and influence in the European kingdoms, high-ranking officials in Muslim nations often were Christians or Jews. It always is worth remembering that, until the 20th century, a monotheistic religious minority was more likely to flourish under Muslim rule than under European Christian.

Having drawn the faiths here as similarly as possible, stark differences yet remain. To me, the most stark is in the instruction of the founders of the two religions. Jesus apparently never issued battlefield orders or made violence and warfare central to his message. On the surface reading of the Quran -- the only kind I am qualified to give it -- Muhammad did. On the one hand, I can understand this in the context of the time and place he lived. But now Islam is stuck with it. Like Christianity is stuck with some of the thornier quotes of Paul about women. Faiths cannot be amended, like political constitutions.

* * *

Characteristically, in the joke I told at the start of this post, Hume made "Benedict" originally "Mustafa," a Turkish Muslim. The joke makes better sense if Benedict had been a polytheist first, not a Muslim, who certainly would have had a purer sense of "one god" than a Catholic.

But to Hume and his audience, Islam was the "other" religion most available to them (Judaism was encumbered, for the purpose, by its presumed role as the root of Christianity). Europeans knew the Turks, the Saracens, as neighbors and they understood a little of their beliefs.

Thus Hume, in his "Natural History of Religion," frequently criticized Islam when he really meant to criticize Christianity. The follies of the faithful he attacked were ones central to Christianity, yet he pointed them out as fallacies of Muhammad, in whose doctrine they often formed a minor or negligible aspect. This Islamic straw man was Hume's politic approach to the topic in a time when a direct attack on Christian fundamentals could have robbed him of his audience.

Perhaps Benedict, the pope, was acting in the same spirit.

::applause::

"We are of Muslim culture. We oppose misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and the political use of Islam. We reassert a living secularism."

Allah-hu akbar. Somebody buy Tewfik Allal a beer.