Intelligence Under Attack Part I

Inside the US the attack on intelligence by Ted Cruz’ new foreign policy advisors directly hurts Muslims and the Muslim community. Yet it has a far more detrimental effect in the long term on Christians and all Americans of faith. Because once you undermine the foundations of civil discourse about religion then every religion or religious viewpoint becomes open to lies, distortions, and illogic undertaken for political purposes.

The Washington Post has reported that Ted Cruz has put into place a group of foreign policy advisors who have long engaged in an attack on Islam and the Muslim community in America and abroad. http://wapo.st/1XxobSEv Their particular approach involves distorted facts, outright lies, and illogical polemic. It is as much an attack on the mind as it is on a religion and its people.

I have a raft of the books by these anti-Muslim polemicists that prove the point. But I offer one of Gaffney’s own op ed pieces, which will link to others, so you get the gist. http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2016/03/16/does-islam-hate-us/

I applaud the Post for exposing the vacuousness of a foreign policy built on such a shallow understanding of the world. At the same time we need to look deeper than their conspiracy theories and distortions of Islam to understand the degree to which theirs isn’t merely an unfair attack on Islam and Muslims, but an attack on intelligence as a personal and civic virtue.

First, the key characteristic of Cruz’ new foreign policy team is that rather than trying to understand Islam as a worldwide movement of Muslims they cherry pick Islamic texts and statements by reputed Islamic authorities to justify their existing bias. And in doing so they interpret Islamic texts in ways that Muslims themselves don’t recognize and which they do not apply to their own scriptures.

In the Op-Ed piece quoted above Gaffney’s move is to assert that Islamic authorities hate people who follow constitutional governments rather than God’s law. And while he acknowledges that not all Muslims agree with this, he says they are regarded by “Islam” as apostates. Now Gaffney doesn’t site his sources but I could fill in those gaps from the literature of writers like Mahmoud Mawdudi, the more radical Sayyid Qutb, or more classical sources such as Ibn Taymiyya. Still,  the rational question isn’t whether there are Muslims who oppose constitutional government as opposed to Shari’a, but whether these Muslims represent “Islam.”

Gaffney asserts that his selection of authorities represent “Islam” while other Muslim voices represent “apostasy.” On what grounds? Recently a huge gathering of world-renowned Muslim scholars in Marakkesh (http://www.marrakeshdeclaration.org/) strongly supported Muslim efforts to develop constitutional government that respects religious minorities. And they did so on a now common Muslim reading of the Muhammad’s agreement with the tribes of Yathrib as a “constitution.”

Indeed there is a rich Islamic political literature, spanning the Muslim world from Morocco to Indonesia, supporting modern constitutionalism as the appropriate foundation for civil government. Writers like Tariq Ramadan are rock stars in the Muslim world. His works, Radical Islam and To Be A European Muslim offer clear Islamic arguments for constitutional government.

The fact that Gaffney willingly ignores much of the history of modern Islamic thought, as well as the classical political thought of Mawardi, al-Ghazali, and Ibn Khaldun demonstrates his hypocrisy, but more importantly promotes the kind of intellectual laziness that already grips American society. Gaffney sells multiple half truths as truth, and in doing so simply creates plausible lies, thus literally stupefying his followers and sponsors.

Another move by the enemies of intelligence is found their use of the so-called “verses of the Sword” to justify the assertion that Islam commands killing all Jews and “non-believers” or kafir. (See Robert Spencer’s https://www.jihadwatch.org/islam-101) This document maintains that these verses, because they come later than verses with a more positive attitude toward Christians and Jews, “abrogate” the earlier verses.

There are two problems here. First, virtually all Muslims know that these verses were revealed in, and limited to specific historical contexts. Their meaning is linked to those contexts and don’t necessarily represent a universal command. (This is not so different from the vast majority of Jews who understand that the command to kill all the inhabitants of the promised land was limited to that time and place.)

Secondly the document offers an interpretation of the concept of abrogation in Islamic legal thinking that isn’t used by Muslims. “Abrogation” doesn’t mean that a later revelation in the Qur’an simply cancels out another. That would be ridiculous from an Islamic standpoint since the Qur’an has existed from all eternity. It means, rather, that the later revelation is more applicable to its context than the earlier. It isn’t a way of explaining away God’s eternal Word. It is a way of accounting for the temporal nature of its revelation to Muhammad.

For Muslims, historically and in modern times, the meaning and force of the so-called “sword” verses is constrained by numerous other verses that spell out the principles for relating peacefully to non-Muslims. But if this idea of interpreting verses in context is too sophisticated one might also consider logic. If for 1300 years Muslims believed they were duty bound to slaughter non-Muslims, and held pre-eminent power, why didn’t they ever do it? Why did they allow huge minorities of Christians, Jews, Hindus, and others survive?

Maybe because Muslims were reading their own scripture and interpreting their own tradition as Muslims, and not as American polemicists and politicians with a mission of sowing hatred and fear for political advantage. Cruz’ advisors are as hypocritical as their polemical Muslim counterparts in applying to the religious traditions of others standards that they will not apply to their own.

Another common example of this political abuse of human rationality is found in attacks on “Shari’a” as a total system of law that American Muslims are supposedly obliged to follow, including those parts (above) urging the slaughter of “infidels.” (See both Robert Spencer and Frank Gaffney on this.)

Even the most cursory reading of the history and content of Islamic law reveals this idea to be ludicrously out of touch with reality. First, “Shari’a” doesn’t actually exist. It is an abstract concept meaning “divine guidance.” What Muslims have followed is fiqh, or rules laid down in the Qur’an, by Muhammad, or by later judges down through history regarding what God wants done specifically in certain cases. A couple of three notes about fiqh.

1. The collections of rulings that are commonly called Shari’a are not the only legal rulings to which Muslims were bound. Law could also be made by political leaders, and indeed most were. This is specifically allowed in Islamic legal theory and has existed in Islamic states from the beginning.
2. By the 11th century Muslim rulers and religious authorities had recognized that specific legal rulings could become outdated or be in need of new interpretation. Thus they agreed on five general principles that could guide a judge in applying past rulings when they were out of date or contradictory. So even the books of laws were not fixed in application – they were always scrutinized in light of the overarching purpose of Shari’a.
3. The books of laws are quite specific in regard to Muslims in non-Muslim nations: Muslims are obliged to live under the law of the land in which they reside. So long as they are free to practice their religion (and this means a specific set of laws governing ritual matters, not the whole of the books of laws) then they must obey the law of the land.

So virtually everything that the Cruz’ team and its allies have said is false or misleading. It is a set of distortions about Islamic teaching pressed upon a frightened public. And what these distortions have done is to make the American public stupid. They make us know less than we knew before about a real and important part of our world.

And as I’ve noted, the same thing is found in all religious polemics intended to belittle and marginalize people of another faith.

Outside the US the Muslim attack on intelligence is consequential primarily for Muslims, who suffer the great brunt of violence against whatever group the Islamists dislike, but also Christians, Jews, and other religious minorities. More on that in the next blog.

Inside the US the attack on intelligence by Ted Cruz’ house of cards directly hurts Muslims and the Muslim community, but it has a far more detrimental effect in the long term on Christians and beyond that all Americans of faith. Because once you undermine the foundations of civil discourse about religion then every religion, or religious viewpoint becomes open to lies, distortions, and illogical thinking undertaken for political purposes.