I can understand that the administration is treading
carefully when talking about the current Islamic State crisis. It is the Muslim
world itself, and its religious and theological leaders, who ultimately are
central to any successful move to damp down the appeal and spread of this
group. The administration, for obvious reasons, doesn’t want to alienate these
leaders or the vast majority of peaceful Muslim followers by appearing to be at
war with the entire Muslim world or the entire religion of Islam.
Nonetheless, ISIS is an Islamic movement, informed by
the Qur’an and Sharia law, and there are historical precedents in Islamic history
for most of what they are doing. The
Prophet, after all, led an expansionist empire whose conquering armies made it
all the way to the gates of Vienna before they were stopped – by force. And the
Qur’an makes it abundantly clear that
the desired ultimate objective is to bring the entire world under Islamic rule.
The president’s comparison with Christianity was a little
off center, since in fact the Crusades, brutal and misguided as they were, were
fundamentally a defensive attempt to retake land originally conquered by Muslim
armies. Nonetheless, Christianity itself
does have a bloody and intolerant history of pogroms, brutal Protestant-Catholic
wars, Inquisitions, burning of “heretics” (anyone who didn’t subscribe to the “official”
views) and mass eradication of whole “heretic” communities. It is not a history to be proud of, but it is
a history Christianity has at this point largely, if not completely, grown out
of. There are still fringe Christian
groups and individuals whose interpretation of their religious duties leads
them to do things like murder abortion doctors or harass the funerals of
military personnel, but there aren’t very many of them. And there is in
Christianity an anti-Jewish bias, and an anti-woman bias, that still persists,
in part because early Christian writers embedded their own culture’s biases in
the Gospels and the other New Testament books. But on the whole Christianity
has grown out of wholesale conquest and murder in the name of religion (if not
of nationalism). Nonetheless, a literal interpretation of the Bible and of the
writings of various revered Christian saints and authors would provide ample
theological support for many illiberal actions.
The core point that the president missed is that at this particular
moment in history, it is a Muslim extremist group, not a Christian extremist
group, that is conquering and brutalizing large swaths of Middle Eastern territory.
And that Muslim extremist group is clearly and openly motivated and directed by
their interpretation (perhaps incorrect, perhaps not) of the Qur’an, Sharia law and the Sunnah. It will take Islamic theologians (not
Christian ones) to fight this war of ideas.
Of course this is easier said than done, for a number of
reasons. For one thing, Islam is still in the midst of its own version of the
brutal Catholic-Protestant wars – the Sunni-Shia wars. ISIS is a Sunni movement,
which is why it has yet to move successfully into the predominantly Shia southern
half of Iraq. For another thing, the ultimate religious authority in Sunni
Islam, the one person who might be able to authoritatively counter the ISIS
theology, is the Caliph. Unfortunately the last widely-recognized Caliphate lost power in 1924 with the
dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The only Caliph
currently around is Abu
Bakr al-Baghdad, ISIS’s own self-proclaimed Caliph. Fortunately his seems not to be recognized as
a valid Caliphate by the majority of
the world’s Sunni or we would be in a lot worse trouble.
Ultimately
the worldwide Islamic community is going to have to come to terms with the remnants
of the harsh medieval, expansionist, desert culture embedded in its sacred
writings and theology, either by ignoring the illiberal parts or by revising or
reinterpreting them in terms better suited to today’s world as most Christians
have learned to do with their sacred writings.
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