Author: Daniel Philpott

ArcU blogger John Owen has just published — and has been receiving wide attention for — Confronting Political Islam: Six Lessons from the West’s Past.  Here is Princeton University Press’s description:

How should the Western world today respond to the challenges of political Islam? Taking an original approach to answer this question, Confronting Political Islam compares Islamism’s struggle with secularism to other prolonged ideological clashes in Western history. By examining the past conflicts that have torn Europe and the Americas—and how they have been supported by underground networks, fomented radicalism and revolution, and triggered foreign interventions and international conflicts—John Owen draws six major lessons to demonstrate that much of what we think about political Islam is wrong.

Owen focuses on the origins and dynamics of twentieth-century struggles among Communism, Fascism, and liberal democracy; the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century contests between monarchism and republicanism; and the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars of religion between Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and others. Owen then applies principles learned from the successes and mistakes of governments during these conflicts to the contemporary debates embroiling the Middle East. He concludes that ideological struggles last longer than most people presume; ideologies are not monolithic; foreign interventions are the norm; a state may be both rational and ideological; an ideology wins when states that exemplify it outperform other states across a range of measures; and the ideology that wins may be a surprise.

Looking at the history of the Western world itself and the fraught questions over how societies should be ordered,Confronting Political Islam upends some of the conventional wisdom about the current upheavals in the Muslim world.

See here for an interview with John on the book.

Much attention lately has been going to an article recently published in the Atlantic Monthly, “What ISIS Really Wants,” by Graeme Wood.  Wood makes the case that ISIS cannot be explained except as an outgrowth of the Quran and basic Islamic theology — in contrast, say, to the protestations of President Obama (and other American presidents — see this excellent piece by David Brooks) that ISIS is inimical to the true Islam and has roots in social dysfunctions like economic dislocation. Wood shows that the group adheres strictly and deliberately to Islamic teaching, including in its cruelest exploits.

Wood’s piece is getting lots of criticism (see here for a good example), much of it arguing, like Obama does, that ISIS is at odds with mainstream Islam and that Islam strongly forbids its gory deeds.

I am inclined to agree that ISIS should not be portrayed as the inevitable or even likely outgrowth of Islamic texts and core teachings.   I would also caution though, against latter-day secularization theorists who want to reduce ISIS to poverty, economic flux, weak governance, the desire of young men for adventure, and the ill effects of western intervention.  All of these factors might contribute to ISIS, but Wood’s article makes clear that the group’s methods and motivations take Islamic teaching quite seriously.  ISIS is serious about a Caliphate, serious about the apocalypse, and serious about divinely sanctioned offensive warfare that makes little distinction between combatants and civilians.

In the end, it would be better to say (as Wood does) that ISIS strongly adheres to Islamic texts and teachings but also to say (as Wood does not, at least very strongly or clearly) that its interpretation of these teachings is a highly unusual one, held by a tiny minority, and strongly at odds with the broad expanse of the Islamic tradition, both today and historically. ISIS is a religious sect: genuinely driven by faith, esoteric, atypical, and very, very bloody.

See this latest piece on attacks on churches and the arrest of Christians protesting these attacks in India.  Quoted is Chad Bauman of Butler University, who is one of the research scholars for Under Caesar’s Sword, the three year project on how Christians respond to persecution organized jointly by the Center for Civil and Human Rights at Notre Dame and the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University.

We’ve been following the case of Yara Sallam, an alumna of the Center for Civil and Human Rights masters degree program in human rights law (class of 2011), whom the Egyptian government has jailed for her human rights opposition.  She is one of the main subjects of a BBC piece.  The last paragraph quotes a letter she wrote from jail and expresses how she views her cause.

Friday, South Africa’s Minister of Justice, Michael Masutha, announced that Eugene de Kock, head of the Vlakplass secret police under apartheid, was to be released on parole.  See here for a thoughtful reflection on the decision by Fr. Russell Pollitt, S.J., in America.  Known as “Prime Evil” for his ordering of more than 100 instance of murder, torture and fraud, de Kock was released after serving some 20 years in jail, this being only a small portion of the 212 years to which he had been sentenced.

Sandra Mama, the widow of one of de Kock’s victims, responded with  . . . a statement of support.  Mama and her children had visited de Kock in prison after he had made contact with them . . . and forgave him.  As Fr. Pollitt describes, other victims’ family members forgave him, too, in the atmosphere of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Not all forgave de Kock.  Pollitt explains that the brother of a human rights lawyer whom de Kock had murdered protested that justice had been denied.  Psychologist and Truth and Reconciliation Commission staffer Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, fascinated with and ultimately a vocal proponent of forgiveness, experienced conflicted feelings during the several trips she made to visit de Kock in prison in researching her book, A Human Being Died That Night.  She describes becoming empathetic with de Kock’s humanity but then suddenly recoiling, wondering if she was naively being drawn into the web of a wily and malicious spider.  By the end of her book, though, she ends up concluding that forgiveness is meaningful and possible, even of the de Kocks of the world.

In my own study of political societies facing past injustices all over the world, I have found few countries where leading perpetrators of atrocious deeds come to repent for these deeds and accept forgiveness.  South Africa is an exception.  The explanation lies in moral leadership.  Reconciliation and forgiveness had informed the anti-apartheid movement for several decades, so that once South Africa had made its transition to multi-party democracy beginning in 1990, leaders like Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and many others were poised to make these themes South Africa’s guideposts for dealing with its past of injustice.  Numerous blacks followed in this direction.  Behind this leadership, in turn, was the influence of Christian churches and theology.  Only this environment and this history can explain how, on Friday, a black Minister of Justice granted parole to the killer of tens of anti-apartheid activists.

We’ve been following forced conversions and other manifestations of radical Hindu intolerance in India.  President Obama deserves credit for speaking to the issue eloquently on his trip to India.  India’s Catholic bishops pled for religious freedom recently, too.

Update on Thursday, January 29th: More good stories have come out on President Obama’s appeal for religious tolerance, including this one by Harvard Business School’s Lakshmi Iyer on Obama’s speech and this one on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s possible blind eye towards anti-Muslim outbursts In India.

Meanwhile, the fighting Buddhist theme can be witnessed not only in Sri Lanka but also in Myanmar.  See this revealing piece.

Paola Bernardini, a friend of mine who is Associate Director for Research, Contending Modernities, at the University Notre Dame, guest blogs in memory of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah:

Saudi Arabia is rated among the worst of the countries which restrict basic civil and political liberties. In this hereditary monarchy grounded on the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence, political parties are forbidden; the public practice of any religion other than Sunni Islam is restricted (including Shia Islam); women are not allowed to drive, nor to hold public office; the media is controlled by government and any opposition to the regime is severely punished with prison and corporal punishment.

And yet, the late King of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz, who died last week at the age of 91, was known to be a liberal.  As last Friday’s New York Times columnist stated, “King Abdullah’s reign was a constant effort to balance desert traditions with the demands of the modern world.” In only 10 years, which is how long he officially ruled, he appointed the country’s first female deputy minister; started a Center for National Dialogue  headed by  “a 70-strong group of worthies, including, unusually for Saudi Arabia, Shias, women and some noted liberals,” with the role of discussing reform and introducing  more tolerance for religious diversity within Saudi institutions; paid a visit to Pope Benedict XVI in the Vatican (the first ever of a Saudi monarch); sponsored the creation of the Vienna Center for Interfaith Dialogue, which carries his name and has a board of directors with representatives of Judaism, Christianity and Hinduism; and created the first co-ed university on Saudi soil — KAUST, North of Jeddah — open to both Saudi and Western youth and faculty, where women can drive on campus, the religious police is not allowed and, according to rumors, non-Muslim have their own space for prayer.  These few and yet important attempts at modernization are the reason why the death of King Abdullah bin-Aziz was received with sadness, even when news of a new Saudi blogger being detained in prison and sentenced to 1000 lashes merely for having expressed his political dissent on the web, was being circulated. Hopefully, the new King Salman, who has assumed the throne, will follow in his brother’s footsteps, no matter how strong the resistance on the part of the religious conservatives will be.

The Charlie Hebdo killings have reignited the question of whether and how Muslims can be integrated into European societies.  By what principle can such integration can succeed?  I take up the question in a two-part posting at Cornerstone, the blog of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center.

In Part One, I look for an answer in the much-discussed work of Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil.  Scott takes France to task for making a universal out of its aggressive secularism, which turns out to be a very particular approach to religion and politics known as laïcité — and one that marginalizes Muslims.  This much, Scott gets right.

But does Scott provide a better way forward?  In Part Two, I express skepticism.  Her postmodern politics of difference undermines her efforts to find a principle upon which religious and secular people can live together.  More promising is religious freedom, a universal principle that affords wide latitude to religion while respecting liberal democracy.

My arguments here echo those that I invoked earlier on this blog in a debate with Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and that Timothy Samuel Shah invoked in his reflection on Jacques Berlinerblau’s critique of “pomofoco.”