arcoftheuniverse

A writer who travels regularly to Cuba for humanitarian work reports on a growing sense of unrest in Cuba.  This is taking place while religion grows even as it still faces repression.   This paragraph captures the author’s spirit well:

While Evangelical and some Catholic churches are seeing new growth, Cuban society is disintegrating. Cities are seeing a growth of gangs and chemical addictions. Cuba has the highest rate of divorce in Latin America, and grinding poverty drives thousands of young women into prostitution. A female physician who doubles as a Pentecostal pastor told me that the biggest problem facing Cuba is philosophical—nihilism and relativism, which produce a sense of hopelessness. The result is a birthrate under replacement level. With fewer babies being born, and one of the highest abortion rates in Latin America, Cuba’s population of 11 million is declining.

What follows is an insightful guest post by Dennis Hoover, who is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Institute for Global Engagement, an innovative think-tank that promotes religious freedom through a methodology of friendship and engagement.  Dennis is also executive director of the Center on Faith & International Affairs (CFIA) and edits CFIA’s journal, The Review of Faith & International Affairs, a lively journal that serves as a forum for thought and practical ideas in religious and international affairs.

America has an Islam crisis which is centered, in a very basic way, on how to even talk about it. Nowhere was that more clear than in the controversy surrounding last month’s “White House Summit to Counter Violent Extremism.” In the weeks leading up to the Summit, the Administration was subjected to withering criticism—mostly from the right, but also from some formidable voices on the left—for refusing to describe as “Islamic” any terrorism committed by self-declared Muslims. Although this rhetorical posture has a long and bi-partisan history, in the current context patience is thin for anything that smacks of political correctness.

Enter the new “Office of Religion and Global Affairs” at the State Department, led by the widely respected Shaun Casey. Can Mr. Casey help rescue the debate? The daunting challenge will be to find the sweet spot of constructive candor.

The Office of Religion and Global Affairs is in some ways a continuation of the State Department’s prior Office of Faith-based Community Initiatives. But more than the name has changed. Several religion-related entities are now consolidated under the Office of Religion and Global Affairs: the Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Special Representative to Muslim Communities, and the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism.

Plenty are calling the changes welcome news. Institutional capacity and strategic coherence are improved, not to mention branding clarity (“faith-based” has always been a clunky, if not constitutionally suspect, modifier to use in a governmental context). However, having raised the profile of religious engagement in U.S. foreign policy, the bar is now also raised in terms of the rhetoric employed in religion-focused diplomacy—most especially in engagement of Muslim leaders, organizations, and movements.

What is or isn’t said about Islam is going to be minutely scrutinized (not least by the Obama Administration’s many critics in the Fox News echo chamber). Tough topics will need to be raised. Treading too lightly risks wasting everyone’s time on polite inter-faith platitudes of peace. Yet an overabundance of name-shame-blame “candor” about Islam can be not only time-wasting but acutely counterproductive—it unnecessarily confers religious legitimacy on violent extremists, and alienates Muslim allies in the war against them.

And the office will need to say something: Two of the three envoys now reporting to Casey are explicitly about engaging Muslim actors, and the third is focused on combating Anti-Semitism, which of course involves confronting Muslim Anti-Semitism alongside all the other growing forms of Anti-Semitism (many of them Christian).

What to say? And how to say it? There are no easy answers, but a helpful point of rhetorical reference is President Obama’s own speech at the White House Summit to Counter Violent Extremism. Although most of the news media missed it completely, Obama’s oratory did in fact reach a new level of constructive candor:

Al Qaeda and ISIL do draw, selectively, from the Islamic texts. They do depend upon the misperception around the world that they speak in some fashion for people of the Muslim faith, that Islam is somehow inherently violent, that there is some sort of clash of civilizations. … [T]here’s a strain of thought that doesn’t embrace ISIL’s tactics, doesn’t embrace violence, but does buy into the notion that the Muslim world has suffered historical grievances—sometimes that’s accurate—does buy into the belief that so many of the ills in the Middle East flow from a history of colonialism or conspiracy; does buy into the idea that Islam is incompatible with modernity or tolerance, or that it’s been polluted by Western values. … So just as leaders like myself reject the notion that terrorists like ISIL genuinely represent Islam, Muslim leaders need to do more to discredit the notion that our nations are determined to suppress Islam, that there’s an inherent clash in civilizations.

Here’s hoping the newly reconfigured and renamed Office of Religion and Global Affairs will be similarly deft in its diplomatic truth-telling in the challenging years ahead.

An excellent piece in Foreign Policy — significantly, a highly mainstream forum — documents the strange silence in the U.S. about violence towards and displacement of Christians in the Middle East.

Here is a preview:

Last August, President Barack Obama signed off on legislation creating a special envoy charged with aiding the ancient Christian communities and other beleaguered religious minorities being targeted by the Islamic State.

The bill was a modest one — the new position was given a budget of just $1 million — and the White House quietly announced the signing in a late-afternoon press release that lumped it in with an array of other low profile legislation. Neither Obama nor any prominent lawmakers made any explicit public reference to the bill.

Seven months later, the position remains unfilled — a small but concrete example of Washington’s passivity in the face of an ongoing wave of atrocities against the Assyrian, Chaldean, and other Christian communities of Iraq and Syria. The Islamic State has razed centuries-old churches and monasteries, beheaded and crucified Christians, and mounted a concerted campaign to drive Christians out of cities and towns they’ve lived in for thousands of years. The Iraqi city of Mosul had a Christian population of 35,000 when U.S. forces invaded the country in 2003; today, with the city in the hands of the Islamic State, the vast majority of them have fled.

Every holiday season, politicians in America take to the airwaves to rail against a so-called “war on Christmas” or “war on Easter,” pointing to things like major retailers wishing shoppers generic “happy holidays.” But on the subject of the Middle East, where an actual war on Christians is in full swing, those same voices are silent. A push to use American aircraft to shield the areas of Iraq where Christians have fled has gone nowhere. Legislation that would fast-track visa applications from Christians looking to leave for the United States never even came up for a vote. The White House, meanwhile, won’t say if or when it will fill the special envoy position.

“It’s been difficult to get the attention of the previous administration, or the current one, when it comes to the urgent need to act,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo, the California Democrat who drafted the visa legislation. “The classic definition of genocide is the complete annihilation of a group of people. The Islamic State is well on its way. It keeps me up at night.”

Several of our posts have dealt with the hot question of how deeply rooted violent jihadism is in Islam.   An excellent recent piece in The Economist looks at debates on the question that are now unfolding within Islam itself.   It is well worth reading.

This past Thursday night, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, President of the University of Notre Dame for 35 years, passed away.  Obituaries in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, and other prominent venues have recounted his legendary accomplishments and stories associated with him.

Hesburgh, of course, is the priest to the left of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the picture at the top of this page, one that was taken in Chicago in 1964. Appointed to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights by President Eisenhower in 1957, taking on the chair of the commission in 1969, Hesburgh was far more than a figurehead in the civil rights movement.  He traveled the country hearing of and writing reports on African-Americans who lacked access to voting, housing, jobs, education, opportunity, and justice.  When the commission was hobbled by partisan wrangling in its early years, he brought the members to a Notre Dame retreat at Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin for a day of fishing and eating steaks.  The agreements achieved there paved the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1964.

In 1971, Hesburgh tussled with President Nixon over Nixon’s opposition to school busing.  Shortly after Nixon’s re-election in 1972, he asked Hesburgh to resign and Hesburgh accepted.

Hesburgh sought to continue his civil rights legacy by founding the Center for Civil and Human Rights in 1973.  Today, as a result of Hesburgh’s own influence, the Center stresses human rights, which it promotes around the globe.  But we never forget what Hesburgh did for America’s historic civil rights struggle.  A large scale version of the picture of Hesburgh marching with King hangs in our lounge.

It was perhaps the greatest episode of Hesburgh’s leadership as President of Notre Dame.  First, he was motivated directly by the commitment to social justice that he derived from being a priest.  He said that “priest” would be the one word that he would want on his tombstone.  Second, it was leadership that made a great difference in the lives of Americans and that strengthened the country’s founding ideals.  Third, it was a sign of his national reputation that his leadership had already garnered that he was appointed to the Civil Rights Commission after only five years into his tenure as university president.

May this legendary American, and even more so, this extraordinary priest, rest in God’s eternal peace.

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.