Catholic and Enjoying It!
Sometimes, I live up to my blog motto, and I think last week was one of those times. Busy with other projects, I happened to run across this, felt incensed at the crass manipulation it highlights, and sounded off with my disgust at Fox and it’s cynical dishonesty. I don’t really regret that. But I do regret making the stupid statement that the Cordoba Mosque is just a local issue and, in particular, I regret calling the matter a “phony national controversy that has been ginned up by Fox, Newt Gingrich and others who just needed a pool table to keep River City excited till the elections in November.” I do think that Fox and Gingrich are completely cynical, but I don’t think that everybody who opposes the mosque is, nor do I think the proponents of the mosque are thinking clearly about what they are attempting to do. Or rather, I think they are giving in to the darker features of the religion they themselves are (I think) trying to figure out how to curb.
Why do I think Gingrich a cynic? Well, a hundred reasons predating this particular controversy. A thrice-married dirtbag who served his wife with divorce papers while she was in hospital and who pontificates about family values? Yeah, pretty much my definition of cynic. In this particular scenario, what I find odious is Gingrich’s eagerness to frenzy the mob by declaring people who say things like this…:
“Far from defeating terrorism, today’s government-to-government foreign-aid system can actually incite it by propping up corrupt and repressive one-party states.”
or this…
“Islamic terrorists do not come from another moral universe … they arise from oppressive societies that … Washington had a hand in creating.”
to be like Nazis to be stunning displays of cynicism.
Why? Because only the second quote is from Imam Feisal Abdul-Rauf, the guy that is bent on building the Cordoba Mosque. The first quote, which says basically the same thing, is from Newt Gingrich. When Gingrich acknowledge the reality that our policies create blowback, he is being a insightful conservative pol criticizing the Obama Administration. When Rauf does it, he is a Nazi who sympathizes with terrorists. In fact, both criticism are right: and not just about the Obama Administration. Gingrich knows this but, being a cynic, doesn’t care. He has no principles beyond the acquisition of power–much like many other denizens of the land inside the Beltway.
In short, I dislike the way in which the Manipulators of Power are latching on to the genuine pain and confusion of people and exploiting it for the sake of gaining power. It’s a trait I loathe with full bipartisan contempt whether it’s the Obama sob story on behalf of infanticide and partial birth abortion (but I repeat myself) or this stuff. That was what fueled my burst of temper last week. But in allowing my temper to get the best of me, I also wrongfully suggested that anybody who agreed that the Mosque should not be built was a “sucker”. Mea culpa. As John C. Wright and Zippy both pointed out in my comboxes, there are lots of people who object strongly to the mosque for reasons that have nothing to do with the Hoohah Ginners at Fox or walking around under Newt’s hairdo.
Further, it was just stupid of me to say that the mosque is a local issue. The maintenance of the grounds at the Cemetery Ridge in Gettysburg, PA was a local issue until July 4, 1863. After that, that ground belonged to all of us. And given that the Cordoba Mosque is (as I found out last week) being built on the site of a building damage by airplane debris flung from the World Trade Center at the moment of impact, that’s good enough for me to persuade me that it is reasonable to call it part of Ground Zero.
So the question remains: what ought I to think of the proposed Mosque and the people who want to build it. I called the project the “Mosque de Triomphe” but, from what I can make of the guy behind it, that does not appear to be his motive. Like Steve Greydanus (whose piece I urge you to read), I’m not particularly sold on the proposition that the Imam is a sinister person with sinister motives. He seems to me to be a classic example of Chesterton’s remark “It takes three to make a quarrel. The full potentialities of human fury cannot be fully realized until a friend tactfully intervenes.”
The narratives which see him as a secret agent bent on the imposition of shariah just don’t seem grounded in reality to me. This is a guy who said, at Daniel Pearl’s funeral:
We are here to assert the Islamic conviction of the moral equivalency of our Abrahamic faiths. If to be a Jew means to say with all one’s heart, mind and soul Shma` Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu Adonai Ahad; hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One, not only today I am a Jew, I have always been one, Mr. Pearl.
If to be a Christian is to love the Lord our God with all of my heart, mind and soul, and to love for my fellow human being what I love for myself, then not only am I a Christian, but I have always been one Mr. Pearl.
And I am here to inform you, with the full authority of the Quranic texts and the practice of the Prophet Muhammad, that to say La ilaha illallah Muhammadun rasulullah is no different.
It expresses the same theological and ethical principles and values
Yes, yes. I’m aware that, as Catholics, we are not indifferentists. Duly noted. I’m not interested in his theological claims. I’m interested in the question, “Does this guy intend to build the Mosque as the world’s biggest End Zone Victory Dance? I don’t think so. Does he rejoice over the death of 3000 Americans? Obviously not. Indeed, can I seriously believe that the sort of thinking in the eulogy, coming from a Muslim, tickles the heart of Osama bin Laden or the other crazy jihadists out there? No. I think their remedy for this guy would be a bullet to the brain as a traitor to the True Faith.
That brings me to the first point. Namely, that for years after 9/11, what we constantly heard clamors for was for Muslims to stand up and repudiate the whack jobs in their midst, marginalize them, and stand as a community against them. So the question for me is: why not accept this as an attempt at that? It seems obvious to me that the guy is hostile to the violent nut jobs, so why isn’t that good enough?
The answer seems to be, “Because he remains a Muslim.” Well, yes. And while I’d certainly be happy to see more and more conversions to Christ in Islam (and they are happening), the fact remains that what the media (and, weirdly, many Christians) trumpet as “good Muslims” are often people who celebrate, not Christ, but post-Christian “western values” that are indistinguishable from the things lionized by our Chattering Classes. So: do we seriously believe that a billion Muslims are going to be persuaded to embrace post-modern Western ex-Muslim atheism like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or post-modern Western lesbian liberal Protestant Islam like Irshad Manji. These are the sorts of models the media tends to embrace when it talks about “good Muslims”. Would you expect serious Catholics to regard this approach as a recommendation for producing “good Catholics”?
I wouldn’t. So I’m not particularly stunned when the Islamosphere doesn’t rise up in imitation of these extremely rare orchids. Instead, I expect the bulk of Muslims who just want to go about their lives to act, well, pretty much as Catholics have done: keeping their heads down as the headlines are full of bad news about their religion, grumbling about the jerks in their midst and not really quite sure what to do. This is *particularly* a problem for Muslims because, unlike Catholics, there is no magisterium. We have actual machinery in place that can (however slowly) institute systemic reform when signs of rot show up. Muslims have nothing like that. They can be swept by winds of fanaticism and have almost nothing institutionally to resist those winds other than mere stubborn quietude.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying Islam doesn’t have a big problem with violent whackjobs in their midst *and* with a tradition that leaves plenty of room for pronouncing a benediction on such whack jobs. It also has a tendency toward self-pity when the whackjobs kill people. But I am saying that there is also a lot of fractiousness in Islam and that Muslims are often the victims of the violence themselves. Islam is not a monolith. 9/11 was not a triumph for Islam, but for a faction in Islam who are quite as ready to kill lots of Muslims (as they, in fact, did that day).
Because of this, there really are Muslims (like, I think, Rauf) who, while remaining Muslim, insist that a different strain of their tradition must be emphasized in opposition to the nutjobs. In short, I think Rauf is one of those “good Muslims” that we used to say we wanted to see more of. Unless, by “good Muslim” we really mean “ex-Muslim” (and I don’t) I don’t see the sense of reflexively assuming his ill will. Such a stance seems to me to only play into the hands of the nutjobs by insisting that all Muslims are indistinguishable from bin Laden.
So I am persuaded that the Mosque was well–even naively–intentioned. Rauf’s oddly guileless remarks about the “iconic” location of the Mosque make it obvious to me that he really had no clue how this would affect New Yorkers. And this is so, it seems to me, precisely because as a Muslim, he assumed the world understood the fractiousness of Islam and would take him as emphasizing what is good in the tradition, rathe take him as planting a flag of conquest. It’s a classic Inside Baseball blunder. His purpose in building the Mosque was to stick a Muslim finger in bin Laden’s eye, rather as if, say, the readers of the National Catholic Reporter had tried to offer a Mass on behalf of the victims of Maciel at some conference of ex-Catholic Survivors of Abuse. Half the people at the conference would be outraged at the very word “Mass”. The other half would be unable to tell the difference All such inside baseball distinctions would be lost in the vast morass of pain caused by the outrage summed up in the simple words “Catholics molested children.”
Same here: Muslims mass-murdered Americans in the name of Islam. That’s what most people know. That’s the non-inside baseball grasp people have of Islam. (Heck, here in Seattle, lots of people aren’t even clear on the difference between Protestant and Catholic.) So it didn’t occur to Rauf that his Mosque would be taken as sticking a finger in America’s eye. He couldn’t think outside the Muslim bubble. It reminds me of similar Inside Baseball thinking in the Catholic world, as when Rome happily announces its willingness to heal a schism with the SSPX, blithely unaware that, out in the real world, an SSPX bishop has been saying insane things about the Holocaust on Youtube. Or, to take another example, issuing directives about ordaining women and dealing with pedophiles in the same breath, giving the general population the impression that the two issues are morally related and morally comparable. Catholic players of Inside Baseball can explain this all they like, but the internecine nature of the quarrel will remain opaque to those outside the Church who aren’t quite clear on the difference between the Pope and Billy Graham. Rauf seems to be facing something of the same thing. His vision is Islamocentric. He doesn’t seem to grasp that his Mosque is not seen as “Muslims United Against Whack Jobs in our Midst”. Indeed, the tenor of the response has been more or less, “If you’ve seen on Muslim, you’ve seen ’em all. And we’ve seen plenty on 9/11.”
Now I don’t share that view, for the reasons given above. Similarly, as I’ve said elsewhere, I’m resistent to the idea of freedom of religion bubbles at Ground Zero, just as I am resistant to the idea of freedom of speech bubbles around abortion clinics. But I am also cognizant of the fact that New York doesn’t *owe* Rauf the right to zone his Mosque. Part of what constitutes the common good is “What do the neighbors think?” Comparison has been raised with the Nuns at Auschwitz. They also came in with good intentions, desiring to “build bridges”. It didn’t work. The overture was not received. It matters not why ultimately. if a gesture of reconciliation is rebuffed, it’s rebuffed. It may be because the gesture is insincere. It may be because it’s refused. It may be both. But whatever the case, when the offer is refused, it seldom helps to say, “Fine! I going to cram my gesture of reconciliation down your throat!”
That appears to me to be about where the Mosque is now: a deeply unwelcome gesture of reconciliation that is more about an internecine quarrel within Islam than it is about the victims of 9/11. Rauf may imagine he is still scoring points against bin Laden and people he perceives as bigots against Islam, but given the polling numbers against the Mosque, it would appear that, if he forgets, you know, the people of the country that was attacked on 9/11, he is suffering from a particularly acute and narcissistic form of mission creep. Give the narcissism and self-pity for which Islam is known–moaning with self-pity every time some Muslim commits an outrage–this seems particularly sub-optimal. Whatever message Rauf is seeking to send by building where he insists on building–it is not being received by the target audience. So he should just build it elsewhere.
Which I am sure will now happen given the immense clout of this blog.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In