"Nimium altercando veritas amittitur." [Through too much fighting, the truth is lost.]
– Publilius Syrus
After the advance into power by the rather repulsive political party known as Sverige Demokraterna – or, rather, the Swedish “Democrats” – in Sweden over the past few weeks, a party that uses for its motto “Keep Sweden Swedish,"1 and after the continual disgrace in American discourse known as DoBYMoH (Don’t Build Your Mosque Here) based on completely refutable and fallacious logic, I am obligated as a citizen of the world and as, hopefully, a fairly enlightened American to help provide a list and call to action to people as aggravated as I am at the pure, unabashed dichotomization of the world’s population over Islam, the victimization narrative present in especially Western discourse, and the rampant falsehoods about what Islam is and what it stands for.
Mainly, I’m just pissed off and would rather see some sanity restored to this discussion.
The responsibilities of citizenship and the fluidity of nationalism are – by way of understatement – tricky and not-simple things. When a person immigrates to a new country to seek its citizenship on paper, a thorny issue erupts surrounding identity. It is easy to point to American policy and citizenship as a quintessence of this problem: an immigrant takes an oath of citizenship in order to uphold the responsibilities and enjoy the rights and privileges of being an American. But what, I ask, is an American? Is there a solid national identity to which we can point, some sort of totemic standard that dictates American-ness? In a word, no. Why so many Greek festivals? Why the allowance of Día de los Muertos celebrations within our borders? Why Oktoberfest? The cliché is that we are a nation of immigrants, and while it may seem specious, it’s true. The singularity of an American identity is its plurality, and, in essence, it’s the only thing that seems to come close being the only idyllic thing entwined with being American. What, then, are the responsibilities of citizenship within a multicultural nation? What, then, are the responsibilities of citizenship in a place like Sweden where immigrant populations are extremely small? What, then, can we say about nationhood and nationalism? If we are a nation without a nationalist identity, what rights do we have to criticize others who bring their cultures, their faiths, with them? If we have minimal cultural standards – standards that cannot necessarily be defined in universals or in government documents – on what defines citizenship and national identity, what rights do citizens have to dictate and legislate practices that exist peacefully in other parts of the world and do not interfere with, and do not dismantle, and serve to bolster, preexisting cultural frameworks? Turkey is not a Muslim nation – it is a secular state where most of its citizens are Muslim. Indonesia is a secular state. India is a secular state. Egypt is a secular state. Religious plurality is allowed and not criticized as means to destroy the fabric of national identity and it is not targeted as process through which societal downfall will occur. As arguably the most culturally diverse nation in the world, why is it we feel the pernicious need to target one faith, one culture, as the bogeyman set to unravel the American way of life when we cannot point to a solid, basic definition of what American means, outside of being able to say “I live in America?” Nationalism, in this sense, must no longer be used as something internal, as something akin to a birthright or a given. I was born in America, but I may not be American because of my views? This is ludicrous. I must conform to a certain physical and ideological ideal in order to be a Swede? Again, ludicrous, and nothing short of begging for stereotypical epithets rather than a veracious identity.
At various points in history, Judaism, Christianity, and other faiths have been oppressed and faced opposition in their development and migration. Obstacles, and even genocide, did not stop these faiths from becoming rooted, becoming established, becoming loved, accepted, and known the world over. To know that Judaism continues to thrive and flourish despite genocides, to know that Christianity flourishes despite schisms and early persecution, only ensures that Islam – and its 1.5 billion adherents – will survive. Attempts to end it, attempts to garner converts, attempts to vilify it: all will ultimately fail as a means of subverting it as a cultural and religious force. Islam has followed a geographic and cultural path no different from the first two Abrahamic faiths: it arose in the holy land, it took a few hundred years to gain traction, and it moved omnidirectionally from its center. It found a home in multiple lands, became a steering force for law and order, dictated cultural values and ethical standards, but with one exception: a fair amount of higher mathematics arose from Muslim scholars, including algorithmic procedures and Algebra. (Zooks! Maybe this is why so many dumb white people worldwide hate Muslims!) At various points, each of these religions became slightly perverted by those who took some vague or poorly-worded scriptures a little too seriously. And lo, we end up with Zionists, Fundamentalist Christians, and Wahabists.
All faiths have their perversions. Each of the Abrahamic faiths has its outlier groups of people hellbent (pardon the pun) on eradicating the Other or, at the very least, converting everyone into their “chosen” / “right” / “only” faith. Here we have a problem that exceeds logic: clearly, in the realm of belief we can have no absolutes. Perhaps absolute morality issues like murder (it should not be done) do exist, but if we are to view religious ideologies as things of rightness, as items bearing moral positive worth and value, we cannot place perfect, infallible values or glowing positive weights upon the tenets and the sum total of what the faiths preach. Aside from this unsolvable problem, we have an issue of deontology: each of the Abrahamic faiths preaches the necessity for nothing but a total conversion of all unbelievers to their respective faiths. So far as I can tell at this point, only Islam is winning at that – and I honestly chalk this up to the fact that by sheer age, Islam is one fifth as old as Judaism, and only half as old as Christianity. According to the Holy Scriptures – take your pick – adherents to the faith must convert and evangelize. Are Judaism and Christianity miffed that the youngest kid on the block is winning, or is it more a matter of moderation? That is to say, where is the fervor? Where is the zeal? The billions of regular adherents of the Abrahamic faiths are creating disservices to their faiths and not upholding their bargains to make each heathen a true believer, yet the vast majority of mainstream participants in these faiths seem to find perfectly acceptable the fact that they are not upholding a major duty of their religions. If this is the case, there needs to be a radical re-cognition of religious duty. And, in so doing, we valorize the fallacious and the fallible. Which, therefore, eradicates any absolutist claim that one faith supersedes another or trumps a lack of faith.
The Constitution guarantees the protection of all people of faith; outrage over the existence of a religion is Constitutionally protected; the existence of a religion res ipsa is also protected. Debate and faith are on equal footing nationally and under the UN Declaration of Human Rights, no single one is elevated above another, and all people worldwide should have the ability to criticize and practice whatever faith they so choose. This should be self-evident.
In terms of the infamous “Ground Zero Mosque,” which – if it is not already apparent, is misnamed as it will be a community center, like the Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side of New York – is being funded privately, transparently, through private hands with private property. Government money and government property are not being exchanged and are not at the center of the debate, yet the rhetoricians from the far right would have us believe that somehow this is being sanctioned by the Federal Government. It is private. Private development is just that, and cannot be subject to public debate or discourse beyond what is already subject to public oversight or transparency; if we as a populace want to dictate how land and real property trade hands, then the entire capitalist system of real property ownership needs to be overhauled so that we micromanage every exchange of money for land. I do not see this happening in human existence any time soon. Further to the point, do we ask for transparency each time a Christian church or community center is built in our neighborhood? Can we be certain that the local Christian church isn’t being backed by a domestic extremist or terrorist group? Do we impose and erect such barriers to the freedom of worship and community outreach when the Church of Latter Day Saints or American Catholic Church plan a new building? Should we? In all fairness, if we are to be selective of where and what faiths do in the public sphere through private means, perhaps we need to insert into the popular imagination a perpetual outcry about all institutions that hold such power and sway – over both our deepest beliefs, and our deepest fears, and how the twain meet.
The topic of what should and should not be built near “Ground Zero” is moot and I will not address it here.
Whether it is simple human nature, or if we as Americans – or we as Westerners – have been conditioned to do so, we seem to fall under the auspices of the binary and instinctively and intellectual have the necessity to find, or conjure, or create a nemesis. Historically, it this has been easy for Americans since the inception and nascence of this country: first, the English. Then, at various points, Native Americans, Chinese, Irish, Polish, Italians, abolitionists, anti-abolitionists, Blacks, Jews, Catholics, Lutherans, Swedes, Norwegians, Mexicans, Cubans, Russians, Germans, Japanese, and countless others. Since 9/11, Islam has been an easy target – a testament to an unbridled and well-embraced fear by the American population, and a further testament to our choice of viscerality and emotion over reason – although over the past few years, popular discontent has shifted to other venues. Popular hatred has regained focus on to the dark spot of Islamophobia, in no short measure aided by the Great Recession, lingering wars in the mid-East and South Asia, and the irascible, irrational fear of a Black President, yet somewhat well-effaced through populist “anger” (viz. Tea Party). We are growing, oddly, either as a species or as a civilization, one, in that we are verily struggling to find a new enemy. We are having difficulty latching on to one subject for derision, one entity to vilify. Perhaps we are finally maturing as an "American" society and, as such, are taking one long, last, brutal swing at an unseen apparition of an enemy that we've created out of our own xenophobia and ignorance.
Furthermore, since popular media and news reporting tend to straddle, if not cross, the line separating “reporting events and allowing the reaction to arise organically” and “creating the reaction in order to promulgate events and evince reportage”, it is ever more difficult to find the truth of a matter and retrieve the heart of causality. It goes without saying that popular media evokes reactions not merely because of what is reported but in the “unbiased” tone through which the mainstream media place “facts” on display.
Finally, we have Islam itself and its practitioners to observe. Dig out an original version of the Quran – not one that adds in the codices of Sharia law, which were added by Muhammad’s aides toward the end of his life and repeatedly reworded over the centuries. At the heart of Islam are messages no different from the other principal faiths of the world: peace, love, kinship, charity, compassion… Then, though, if you wish to read the words about Islamic law, it might be wise to break out the Talmud, or Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and, of course, it would be wise of us who practice these faiths to see the myriad ways we don’t practice these laws, and how Western governments and laws were based upon Judeochristian texts, and how many of these sacred duties were really hygienic and cultural practices: Hallal food? Simple: botulism and salmonella in poorly-cooked meats. No shellfish? Same deal: tough to cook properly. Don’t mix your wool and cotton? Simple: in the desert, it gets really hot, and wool will make you sweat your ass off while cotton breathes and keeps you at least slightly cooler.
So, with this, I say: hug a Muslim. Embrace plurality. Hold on to your faith, but don’t choke it into submission, and don’t let it drag you around. Mankind’s survival – or, at the very least, mankind’s ability not to look like a bunch of screeching, brainless idiots who can live peaceably – depends on it.
1. "Bevara Sverige Svenskt!" - which, literally, means, keep Sweden Swedish. Personally, a nation of 8 million teutonic, blond-haired, blue-eyed beautiful people is not just a false stereotype, but aesthetically and culturally boring.
No comments:
Post a Comment