Link back to commentLet’s parse the implicit, ‘logic’ behind David’s introduction of the fictional dialogue from The Great Gatsby. Why is it ‘apposite’, as he claims, to this discussion? What is David inferring?
It seems to run along these lines:
1. In the fictional dialogue, an obnoxious white supremacist, Tom Buchanan, fretted about ‘white, Nordic’ civilization being threatened by hordes from ‘inferior’ races.
2. Furthermore there existed, about a century ago, some non-fictional white supremacists who spoke in a similar vein (he could have, for good measure, thrown in the Nazis, but maybe he didn’t want to run afoul of Godwin’s Law)
3. So when people speak of civilization today, we can presume they have in mind a racialized conception of civilization, grounded in ‘white’ identity and notions of racial superiority.
4. Ergo, anyone who talks about civilization or civilizational conflicts today must be considered at the very least suspect, with an implication they too are closet white supremacists.
None of this follows, of course, which is why this kind of rationale is never spelt out explicitly, instead it is not-so-subtly implied by David’s talk of ‘troubling lineage’, and so on.
For the record, I regard any concept of civilization grounded in ‘white’ racial identity, or any other racial identity, as anathema. That has always been my view, and always will be. One of the things that drew me to the left in the early 1970s was its clear aspiration to get beyond racial categories and racial talk and judge people on their merits, as proposed so eloquently by Martin Luther King in his great civil rights speech more than half a century ago.
That older, much better, aspiration has tragically been discarded by the modern ‘identarian’ left which is obsessed – absolutely obsessed – about preserving and exacerbating racial distinctions and racial grievances. This is their overriding priority, supplanting all other concerns, not least whether their activism actually improves things for disadvantaged groups (a good topic for another discussion).
The kind of civilization I want to defend is one that embraces Enlightenment universalism, with rights and liberties extended to all irrespective of race, gender and other ‘identities’, a civilization in which contentious issues, including religion, can be debated freely and resolved by peaceful democratic political processes – and in which there is a clear separation between civil and religious realms.
And crucially, a civilization that is capable of reflecting critically on itself, of recognizing and addressing its flaws, such as the abomination of slavery which was torn down after being subjected to a powerful moral critique, spearheaded by the evangelical Christians that David deplores so much, as well as secular activists like Robert G. Ingersol in the US, an early freethinker, abolitionist and advocate of women’s equality.
An aspiration realized, albeit imperfectly, in our own and other Western and non-Western societies.
So in what way does Islam pose a challenge to this kind of civilization? A good starting point is to compare conceptions of human rights in the modern West and Islam.
The post-Enlightenment Western conception of human rights was codified in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 with the support of 48 nations, including the entire West as well as most of the third-world, including the main Muslim-majority nations.
It includes all the most important rights we are familiar with: freedom of expression and movement, guarantees of the right to life and liberty, equality before the law, prohibition of discrimination based on sex, language, political opinion, of slavery, and so on.
It also guarantees in Article 18, the right of all people to change their religious belief, either individually or in community with others, in public or in private.
At the time of adoption, this received the assent of the vast majority of UN member nations. This included all the Muslim majority countries, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, which abstained citing the Declaration’s incompatibility with Sharia law (a number of Soviet-bloc countries also abstained, for their own reasons).
Today we live in a very different climate. In one Muslim-majority country after another, hard-line interpretations of Islam are ascendant, including hitherto moderate states in our own region like Indonesia and Malaysia. In 1990 the Islamic world decided to push back against the Declaration, producing their own version: The Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. This declaration has received the unanimous assent of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the body representing 57 Muslim-majority states.
http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/instree/cairodeclaration.html
The Cairo declaration tries to echo the structure of the UN declaration, but differs starkly in content. In essence, and this is clearly stipulated in Article 24, all rights and freedoms are subject to Sharia, which is the ‘only source of reference’. This includes freedom of speech which is addressed in Article 22:
‘Everyone shall have the right to express his opinion freely in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the Sharia. Everyone shall have the right to advocate what is right, and propagate what is good, and warn against what is wrong and evil according to the norms of Islamic Sharia.’
Sharia, among many other things, prescribes the death penalty for blasphemy and apostasy. So much for freedom to debate religion. As for women, the approach is typified by this provision on freedom of movement (Article 12):
‘Every man shall have the right, within the framework of Sharia, to free movement’
The Cairo declaration effectively negates many of the core human rights protections set out in the UN declaration. Furthermore it amounts to a political program – this is why in the original talk I referred to militant, political Islam, a religion that has an inbuilt political agenda.
This presents an obvious problem for the identarian apologists for Islam in Western academia. Typically, they allude to alternate ‘non-fundamentalist’ interpretations of Islam, interpretations that nowadays seem to have lamentably little clout and following, especially among members of the Islamic scholarly class.
These are fundamental, perhaps irreconcilable, differences. So what happens when these two very different worldviews try to coexist within the one society? Especially when the ‘host’ culture is an open, liberal society imbued with the sense it must welcome difference – and refrain from being ‘judgmental’ about other cultures, even those which sanction practices it would normally find cruel and atavistic?
And which, furthermore, has been educated over two generations to view its own culture as gravely deficient, implicated in just about all the world’s ills? An unbroken litany of oppression, colonialism and slavery for which it is duty bound to make amends, and to feel nothing but guilt and shame?
Well, look at modern Britain, which has a Muslim percentage of its population several times ours (I could have talked about France and several other European countries, but will stick to Britain since developments there are more accessible for obvious linguistic reasons).
Instead of defending what until recently were accepted norms, such as that women should receive equal treatment under the law, it tolerates the emergence of a parallel, Sharia based legal system that, while nominally lacking the force of law, can leverage community support to pressure and intimidate women, especially in family law matters.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/sharia-law-uk-courts-muslim-women-rights-few-compared-islamic-countries-religious-rulings-quran-a8064796.html
Ever since the Enlightenment, it has been an accepted norm that religions should be freely debatable, that Christianity, Judaism and other religions should not be immune from challenges to the historicity or scientific veracity of their scriptures.
Is that norm still operative? I mentioned the case of the historian Tom Holland, who wrote a book disputing the orthodox understanding of the origins of Islam and its texts, and then produced a Channel 4 documentary. When the film went to air, Holland’s Twitter account, and that of his family members, was inundated with what he described as a ‘tsunami of death threats’.
How did David respond to this? He cited another historian who rubbished Holland’s work. This is hardly the point – I neither know, nor particularly care, whether Holland is right about Islam’s early history. The issue is the freedom to debate these matters, which David does not even mention. Talk about missing the point.
What we see here is that a new norm is being established: that, consistent with the Sharia prohibition on blasphemy, for which the punishment is death, criticism of one particular religion is not on, a point made more emphatically by the terrorist murders of the Charlie Hebdo staff. Remember ‘Je suis Charlie’? Well even Charlie isn’t Charlie anymore – since the massacre they have steered well away from ridicule of Islam.
Governments, instead of mounting a robust defence of free speech, have begun to effectively validate this prohibition by increasing legal strictures against ‘Islamophobic’ speech in the guise of anti-hate speech laws, a trend reinforced by recent decisions of the European Court.
Or the norm that regards mutilating children as a gravely serious offence, warranting heavy criminal penalties? This seems to have gone by the board where FGM is concerned, since 1985 a crime warranting a maximum sentence of fourteen years prison, which until July 2019 was completely unenforced, and for which there has been up to now a grand total of one – one! – successful prosecution.
And even that minimal enforcement activity was a response to a scathing parliamentary committee report in 2016 which found that the failure to successfully prosecute a single FGM case was a ‘national scandal’, and that it was ‘beyond belief’ that this had gone on for over 30 years. The report also noted that the poor record on prosecutions would ‘deter those brave enough to come forward’ and ‘result in the preventable mutilation of thousands of girls’.
David’s comment on this is revealing, not least because it is the first time in this discussion that he has bothered to make any comment at all on these issues. He diminishes the gravity by saying it affected ‘a small percentage of Muslim girls’. A small percentage? The government estimates 170,000 women and girls in the UK have undergone the procedure, and that between April 2015 and March 2016 there were 5,702 new cases. Just imagine if someone minimised priestly child abuse in Australia by saying ‘well, its only a small percentage of Catholic boys’.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-37364079
Better to treat FGM as health issue, says David. Really? Does he see no role for the criminal justice system whatever, even in the most egregious cases, including operators trafficking girls overseas for ‘FGM holidays’? What an extraordinary thing for a ‘progressive’ to say.
But he is not alone in this progressive insouciance. I mentioned earlier the comment by that feminist icon, Germaine Greer that to campaign against FGM would be ‘culturally arrogant’. This is all too typical among feminists (with some honourable exceptions). I recently came across this piece of academic feminoid gunk, an article titled ‘Analytic Dualisms, Stunted Sexualities, and the 'Horrified Gaze':Western (Feminist) Dialogues about Female Genital Mutilation’ in which the author said this in the conclusion:
‘What right do we have as Western feminists to form activist groups on behalf of non-Western women? What cultural anxieties does this reveal or conceal? What legacies do Western feminists draw upon when theorizing about or acting on behalf of genitally-mutilated women? Why does this activism so often lead to a lack of reflexivity about U.S. cultural practices (i.e. plastic surgery, body alterations, etc.)?’
… as if there is the slightest comparison between surgery voluntarily undertaken as adults and mutilation inflicted on young girls with no power to resist.
The point I keep stressing about this is not just that it these things go on, but the complete incapacity, bordering on paralysis, of the state and all its instrumentalities and the legal system to deal effectively with the problem. And this, I would have to say, is very much down to the ideology of identity politics and its apologists in academia, the media, politics and business, especially those who, like David, vilify those prepared to raise these issues.
The same goes for the ‘grooming gang’ scandal in the UK that I have mentioned a number of times in this discussion. The issue is not just that this form of very serious criminality exists, and on a large scale at multiple locations. The key problem is that, again, the state and all its protective agencies for a very long time failed to lift a finger to address it, due to a paralyzing fear, frankly acknowledged by some progressive politicians and documented in the investigative journalism of Andrew Norfolk of The Times, as well as the official report by Professor Alexis Jay, of being labelled ‘racist’ or ‘bigoted’.
Those that have dared to speak out, such as the Labour MP representing the city of Rotherham Sarah Champion, are immediately denounced by ‘progressives’ as bigots – Champion was stripped of her shadow portfolio for equalities, to be replaced by then leader Jeremy Corbyn by the MP for Bradford West Naz Shah, who retweeted that grooming gang victims should shut up in the face of adversity. Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson must be turning in their graves at what has become of their old party.
If a society, or a civilization, is not prepared to defend its own norms, in the face a challenge by a much more confident and strident politicized religion like Islam, then over time those norms will be eroded and replaced. This will not happen overnight, of course, but the trends are unmistakable, as parallel societies, with parallel structures and legal systems come into being, from which defection by community members becomes increasingly difficult, and in some cases dangerous. Especially when such defectors (apostates) are denounced by ‘progressives’ as Uncle Toms, ‘House Arabs’ and ‘Native Informants’, as has happened to people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sarah Haider in the US, and Mariam Namazie in the UK.
The result, in due course, is the emergence of closed communities in urban areas, like the banlieues in France and Molenbeek in Brussels (see the article by Tuen Voeten I cited in an earlier post), where we find not vibrant diversity but fearful and repressed monocultures.
I will leave you with the words of the outgoing Interior Minister in Emmanuel Macron’s government Gérard Collomb made in an interview with the weekly magazine L’Express in 2018. After touring the inner cities of Marseille, Toulouse and Paris, he said:
‘The situation is very difficult and the phrase ‘Reconquering the Republic’ is apt because in these districts it’s the law of the strongest that reigns, that of the drug dealers and radical Islamists, which has supplanted the Republic.’
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/10/france-is-fracturing-but-macron-remains-in-denial/
This, David, is what I mean when I talk about a civilizational challenge.