The Threat Within

Simon Jenkins notes the letter that was issued by 138 noted Islamic clerics and leaders regarding Muslim-Christian relations. He is not noticeably impressed.

Coming at the end of Ramadan, the letter is impressive. The signatories embrace a global range of grand muftis, imams, sheikhs and scholars from all denominations of Islam, with a wide span of theological influence. The appeal to religious tolerance at a time of tension between Islam and the West is welcome. But what the letter means needs deconstruction.

Religious leaders like to claim headlines by subjecting politics to a downpour of platitude. The letter makes no mention of (monotheistic) Jews, let alone Hindus and Buddhists. It merely invites the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and others to acknowledge what the archbishop calls “their common scriptural foundations . . . as a basis for justice and peace in the world”. Two religions that embrace “half of humanity” should stand together or, by implication, there will be war.

Such an implication is grandiose, dangerous and wrong. It implies that the Muslim world has a politico-military power that is in some sense equal and opposite to that of Christianity. This elevates the so-called jihadist tendency within Islam to a status that it does not have and should never think it has. It suggests Islam has sufficient power to confront and possibly undermine the West. It implies a balance of power parallel with a balance of theological interpretation.

Such an implication feeds a no less dangerous paranoia in the West. By stating that the “survival of the world” might turn on a struggle between Islam and Christianity, the letter reinforces the militarist fantasies of neoconservatives who see the world as just such a struggle. It is a paranoia which, since 9/11, has driven the “war on terror” and fomented the tension and antagonism to the West to which the scholars’ letter is so vacuous a response.

The chief threat to world security at present lies in the capacity of tiny groups of political Islamists to goad the West into a rolling military retaliation. Extremists on each side feed off the others’ frenzied scenarios so as to garner money and political support for their respective armies of the night. Each sees the other as a cosmic menace and abandons communal tolerance and peaceful diplomacy to counter it. The authors of this letter would be better employed vetting their own blood-curdling mullahs and madrasahs than in writing platitudes to the Pope.

What Jenkins is really worried about is the West regarding the war on terror as a war rather than a police matter. Jenkins does not believe that there is a real Islamist threat to the West, apparently. Rather, he states that the real danger is the American right.

When Thomas Paine told America that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again”, he meant by example, not military conquest. His utopianism was a brave, confident and open-hearted one. That of his successors is sinking into the opposite, a fearful, besieged, security-obsessed wimpishness, in which Muslims rightly feel threatened by the arbitrary violence of the American right.

I am more than a little disturbed at a sudden trend in opinion columns that is rather evident today. I think I'll try to work up a post on that.

Anthony at The Irish Spy also has some questions about the letter. His come from a completely different point of view.