Alongside the honor brigade’s official channel, a community of self-styled blasphemy police — from anonymous blogs such as LoonWatch.com and Ikhras.com to a large and disparate cast of social-media activists — arose and began trying to control the debate on Islam. This wider corps throws the label of “Islamophobe” on pundits, journalists and others who dare to talk about extremist ideology in the religion. Their targets are as large as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and as small as me.
The more action taken against the classically liberal world, the more the medieval machinations grinding away at it and Islam’s future become clear. Lightly linked here “malignant narcissism” within the realm of political psychology, the roots of intellectual stuckness, the propensity for deeply authoritarian and sadistic leadership, become increasingly clear.
As noted on that other post, the discussion of reformation in Islam has been taken up in an earnest fashion by New Age Islam and, of course, there is now no end to criticism from every direction, including from deep within Islam, of an Ummah beset with bloody conflicts and terrorist incidents from Afghanistan to Yemen.
For many, the bottom line on the Banu Qurayza legend — Tarek Fatah denies its authenticity, others embrace it and like it — involves the unconditional surrender of the Jewish tribe followed by the mass slaughter of all of the males (down to the youngest with but a single pubic hair). It stands as the echo in history of what ISIS is doing today and right to the letter of the script as read by Baghdaddi (who may be dead by now . . . we are uncertain of that state of affairs today).
The above noted PBS piece starts this way:
“Judaism was already well established in Medina two centuries before Muhammad’s birth. Although influential, the Jews did not rule the oasis. Rather, they were clients of two large Arab tribes there, the Khazraj and the Aws Allah, who protected them in return for feudal loyalty. Medina’s Jews were expert jewelers, and weapons and armor makers. There were many Jewish clans-some records indicate more than twenty, of which three were prominent-the Banu Nadir, the Banu Qaynuqa, and the Banu Qurayza.
“Various traditions uphold different views, and it is unclear whether Medina’s Jewish clans were Arabized Jews or Arabs who practiced Jewish monotheism. Certainly they were Arabic speakers with Arab names. They followed the fundamental precepts of the Torah, though scholars question their familiarity with the Talmud and Jewish scholarship, and there is a suggestion in the Qur’an that they may have embraced unorthodox beliefs, such as considering the Prophet Ezra the son of God.”
There are now many contradictory renditions of the Banu Qurayza legend and analysis on the web, but that may serve to underscore my argument that part of the world is fighting over survival through corrupted allegiance — the telling of loyal lies — and the risks of promoting an integrity that has God and the ideal — the true — as its standard. We hope for the latter because it serves all universally. It’s better to have honest reporting, honest scholarship, research with integrity, and, perhaps with the Banu Qurayza, the wisdom to say one doesn’t know how the Qurayza lives.
Historically, the Jews as merchants developing wealth have done so because of a circumspect trustworthiness — i.e., people with whom one can do earnest business. The medieval persecutions inevitably apply leverage based in religion — the Spanish Inquisition and the Spanish Expulsion serve as example — to shun, murder, and plunder the Jews for the wealth they have developed. That’s how it works, has always worked, and probably how it worked in the 7th Century: simple theft and murder cloaked in religion.
The Awesome Conversation may become a clear conversation about power, loyalty, idealism, and God.
Within the context of the Islamic Small Wars, there’s political litmus in how one relates to certain symbols, and the Banu Qurayza Legend is one of them. Some embrace the story — a great victory (met with unconditional surrender followed by mass slaughter) — and some, like Tarek Fatah, find it so inexecrable that it needs to be downplayed and written out of the lore being dragged into the future.
Let me suggest four parts or elements that get the machinery working:
1. “Malignant Narcissism” / “Civilizational Narcissism” / relatives of “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” / “Bipolar Disorders” (“grandiose, messianic delusion”) –> each of the labels may represent a straying of innate human energy plus some craziness. The application to conflicts within the “Islamic Small Wars” context should be apparent with some meditation but outside of that, the same applies to variants of “National Socialist” presence, e.g., Putin in Russia, Jobbik in Hungary.
2. “Cultural Poetics and Social Grammar” — words do have a power and poison put in the ears or set before the eyes gets into children very early in the development of language plus self-concept. Good adults are careful with what they impart to their children, and, perhaps, good politicians must be careful with their words, but bad parents and bad politicians — there are lots of “BadDaddy’s” — may have cause to hide something shameful in themselves, to deflect attention away from themselves, to keep on stage a glorious image of themselves in the eyes of others, starting with their children.
3. Ideological Political Programming — the conservative’s abhorrence of dhimmi status, poll taxes, state discrimination speaks to that and may make something of a match between old Stalinist Soviet practices and some notes in Islam that seek the transformation of whole populations using central absolute authority and political torque to do it.
4. Cultural linguistics or language behavior –and as behavior, this may differ from “poetics” (the arrangements of symbols that make language possible). When we listen, when we read: how much do we memorize, parrot, ingest and sustain as stable? How much do we create, invent, question?
When Jews greet “The Binding of Isaac” (“The Akedah”, and bear with me on Isaac), a minority opinion notes that perhaps Abraham should have talked back to God (!) instead of setting off to carry out His instructions without hesitation.
Listen and obey? Listen and question?
Narcissism, cultural programming, political programming, and language behavior as behavior (we’re part of as wild a species as any) would be the four anchors of any approach or analysis of ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hezbollah.
Notably, both Putin and Khamenei operate deeply piratical regimes beneath the cloaks of nationalism and religiosity. They have different trajectories as persons and as representatives of very different states, but they are similar in the pursuit and maintenance of absolute power — absolute control, as if from God — and they apply the same sets of tools for doing that.
I fear overdoing the knowledge part of this kind of view for the fascism it might inspire, if as much has not happened already in the intellectual warrens of governments invested in part in social control. However, considering the Loud Fascism evident in the wild and the necessity of reducing the same in number and force, the above suggests four useful ways of approaching rogue leaders, their psychology, and their movements.
“Shimmer” continues to apply, as may “The Long War” (which suits perfectly the journal that follows it), and the themes built up around authenticity vs invention, medieval vs modern, Islamic Supremacist vs Islamic Democratic Compatibility.
Despite Shadi Hamid’s arguments for a democratic but illiberal Islamicism, that project would seem to have failed in the Muslim-majority states in which autocratic leadership prevails either as expressive of Islamic idealization, as in Saudi Arabia, or as the secular response to the same, as in Egypt and Syria where Islamism has been rejected without successfully attenuating the political absolutism that binds both.
Championing the middle and moderate ranks, which may need a Harris organization to map out the intellectual terrain in its totality, Qanta Ahmed, whom I follow via Facebook, consistently stands up for Islam as essentially graced in the west by liberal multiculturalism and secular tolerance. Indeed, in the western ethos, one’s deepest beliefs about God, nature, and the universe (and one’s self) are owned and sustained persons — free agents in their own lives — not their religious organizations (who may serve only at the pleasure of their subscribers), and not states.
In essence, I would cite Qanta Ahmed as the one (modern) “scholar more powerful against the devil than one thousand worshipers”.
The problem is that not only to “BadDaddy and His Islamic Hate” but to others less obviously stuffed full of themselves and evil, Qanta Ahmed may draw also the moderate to plain nasty “takfiri”, those who accuse others of heresy or treason in relation to their idea of themselves within Islam.
Even in America, leading Muslim organizations and clerics bully with threats of ostracism those Muslims who dare to dissent. Old-guard ideologues, too, used to monopoly control, make it crystal clear to their Muslim critics: Take us on and we will make an example of you as a traitor to the Muslim community (the ummah).
Little more than a month ago, Arizona physician M. Zuhdi Jasser, who years ago embarked on a mission to keep separate “mosque and state”, found himself the target of a fellow of his own mosque, a chiding resembling, in my opinion, the hand-pat-to-cheek known to mafia worldwide.
A little leaning, I call that, a bit of “straighten up, boychick, and get with our program (or else)”.
Whatever it may be called, the incident was aggressive, uncalled for, and, for Dr. Jasser, discomfiting, and, indeed, he placed the best chosen plain word “bullying” in the title of his article.
Is there or is there not “no compulsion in religion”.
A grammatic switch in Islamic culture pits loyalty against integrity, validates lying for gain or power (look through this lens when you visit or revisit the screeds associated with the middle east conflict), and the good who by definition possess integrity find themselves on the outs in their own community of legacy.
We’ll get around to differentiating between the pleasing — and pandering — notes of a language and bedrock human universal wisdom, but for now, while “BadDaddy and the Islamic Hate” burn, rape, murder, and plunder their way around the Iraq-Syria back of beyond, it may bear suggesting that one was the real Islam, emulated in anachronist attitude, dress, language, and ritual, and the other a nascent up-to-speed, modern and progressive Islamic Humanism.
It’s not that one shouldn’t have to choose between Ahmed’s way and Baghdaddi’s blood and horror-filled statement, but that the choice, much less the encouragement to retrogress, should not be available at all.
However, today, that choice is available and “Syriamania” and “Prison Islam” and “Islamic Jihad”, which is just not about good medicine or much good anything else but the jihadist’s immense and unbridled ego and penchant for sadism — see this blog’s pages on “malignant narcissism” and “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy” — are all real and but a handful of leaders have risen to turn the dismal tide.
The Syrian state view and opposition world view that have as a habit of mind ready and vicious (and vacuous) anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist rant haven’t a palatable program for the secular or humanist and post-Enlightenment drivers of the western mind.
The absence of a sympathetic modern human program for the state (Assad’s baggage) and the axis of power that represents political absolutism opposite NATO has tragically kept NATO in position to avoid nuclear Russia while also assigning permit for the disaster to Russia (which pledged $10 million for Syrian relief while spending $51 billion on Sochi).
At the end of each day, whatever our civilizational and religious affiliations may be and their related “self-concepts”, what the Jewish contingent and “Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian” civilization represents is the amassed historical weight of hard won western principles and values.
It’s not that a Jew is worth more than a Muslim, or vice versa, or that the Northern Hemisphere has ruthlessly enslaved the Southern Hemisphere or other such manipulative tripe. It — agape, love, the foundation of a good ethics and experience of a good life — is about dwelling on such an observation as, say, “whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world” (Hillel repeated by Muhammad) and dwelling on the meaning of that long enough to get it and develop some empathy and regard for other souls.
That empathy is not a given in nature: it’s cultivated.
These that get far astray do some damage — and then they do what they do under many ideological banners.
I’ll see how I feel about that on in the morning.
Maybe I’ll like it.
Maybe I won’t.
I don’t like the overuse of “dwelling” but will leave it as authentic verbal jazz.
A little more and I will drop the conversation.
Some social scientists believe that any attitude devolves to some set of beliefs having valence (good thing / bad thing) and intensity (not too bad . . . extremely bad) and primacy. Our legacies in culture and religion, in name and early acquired messages about ourselves (as early as “language uptake”) seem to me primary because we forget having learned such things and then we go an build on them throughout our lives. Our survival includes the perpetuation of these signifying elements of our existence. I think they’re important and believe in evolutionary cultural polyphony but a few have problems with that. Add greed, hormonal motivation, psychological problems, and so fascist dictators and followers are born, and when they grow up and become like BadDaddy with his Islamic Hate terrifying the neighborhood, they are hard to switch off.
That fanaticism may be rooted in a decontextualized and literal reading of the Qur’an, the will to express power by definitively superseding other religions while obtaining absolute control over the lives of others and their assets and otherwise productive energies.
That the Islamic enterprise either contains or has enabled this political program should go without saying; the extent to which the main body either abets, enables, or impedes the progress of “Islamist” elements is arguable. Egypt, for example, reversed the course of the Brotherhood (in Egypt), which handily proved itself anti-democratic and unconcerned with practical and progressive governance; the appearance of the “Islamic State” in Iraq appears to have met either widespread Sunni cooperation or plainly insufficient resistance north of Baghdad despite the development of a military vastly outnumbering the fighters within the incursion.
The comment responded to Adnan Oktar’s latest deploring Islamist aggression in the middle east and Muslim failure to protect Christians and Christian assets in the region: http://www.weeklyblitz.net/2014/07/christian-church-middle-east/ – 7/15/2014.
In relation to my assertion about a “decontextualized and literal reading of the Qur’an”, fate would have me post the following prior to the above:
How ISIS thinks: ““We haven’t given orders to kill the Israelis and the Jews. The war against the nearer enemy, those who rebel against the faith, is more important. Allah commands us in the Koran to fight the hypocrites, because they are much more dangerous than those who are fundamentally heretics.” http://www.haaretz.com/news/world/.premium-1.605097 – 7/15/2014.
Is the Islamic State’s reading of the Qur’an valid or invalid?
If the interpretation is invalid, what are the proofs supporting that position?
While the world may be uncomfortable with the projection of the Islamic superhero who defends all that is “truth, justice, and the Islamic way”, to parody another well known trope, it may prefer a little bit of that to the mindless cruelty of the cookbook Islam whipped up by the host of Muslim Brotherhood affiliates that have expressed their presence in the world through blooms of blood and horror.
What I attempt to address, in general, is a deeply feudal intellectual environment and system that subjugates and destroys humanity by promoting and sustaining in its place the ruthless force that is the will of tyrants.
There’s portal enough right here for covering the region from “narcissistic mortification” to “malignant narcissism” to “narcissistic supply”.
We may not fully understand how or why fascists develop their “popularity” through the subjugation and sadistic control of their minions, but they do, and while events on the ground play out, some will circle these processes in mind — and processes in political psychology — to continuously draw down the reach and scope of that deeply anti-human, anti-God, and anti-social but globally distributed behavior.
BackChannels 