I posted the following on 8/21/2004 at sulekha.com
Given the controversial nature of this post, it is surprising that there were no replies.
Genocide as Suicide Turned Inside Out
I stumbled across the Bernard Lewis Post page while searching for the origin and meaning of "tin pot dictator" which occurs in the paragraph:
"In modern times, the power of the ruler has been vastly augmented by these huge revenues so that he doesn't need public support or public approval of his taxes. It has also been increased by all kinds of modern devices for surveillance and repression so that any tin pot dictator today wields far greater powers than were ever wielded by Suleyman the Magnificent or Harun al-Rashid or any of the legendary rulers of the Islamic past."
It is curious how our wanderings in search engines may lead us to topics and goals very different from the initial question which set us off on our quest.
An acquaintance of mine recently asked me to see the movie "Farhenheit 9/11" and help with ideas for an essay. I was hesitant to see the movie, because I thought it would be about the actual collapse of the twin towers, and I felt I had already seen quite enough. I did not realize that it is a documentary about the political dynamics allegedly at work in the Bush administration. Since I am in the midst of writing about "Farhenheit 9/11," I would value anyone's comments and observations and constructive criticism.
For me, the most important statement to be made about Michael Moore's documentary is that it is an example of freedom of speech in a free society. A film critical of a dictator's regime would earn its author a prison sentence or a death sentence.
The when I first heard the name of the documentary, "FAHRENHEIT 9/11," I immediately thought of the science fiction novel by Ray Bradbury, "Fahrenheit 451." Bradbury described a society in which all books are burned. The temperature of burning paper is 451 degrees Fahrenheit.
Bradbury describes a future in which all books are banned and censored in an attempt to keep the human race from thinking for themselves. This frightening world is one in which people are controlled by the government in every way. A number of restrictions are placed upon the people of this society. One of which is the prohibition of the possession and/or reading of literature. The firemen of this time are paid not to protect citizens from the danger of fires, but to burn all books to ashes.
Recently, I was watching one of the many panel discussions which air nowadays on public educational television analyzing the current climate in the Arab world. One speaker cited the curious statistic that each year more books are translated into Spanish than have been translated into Arabic in the past THOUSAND years. The point he was trying to make with this statistic is that the Arab world is rather close-minded to new ideas and isolated from the intellectual life of the rest of the world.
There is no need to burn books which do not exist.
One of the major problems with Islamic ideology and theocracy is that it attempts to force beliefs and behavior upon society with threats of violence, with acid in the face of a woman unveiled, with public beheadings and amputations, with the honor killing of a sister by her own brother.
I do not believe that one can successfully impose moral codes of behavior with violence and punishment. Such behavior, so disciplined, simply goes underground. Even in Bradbury's novel, the desire for literature goes underground, and people commit books to memory to preserve them from the fire's flames.
Moral and ethical behavior must start from within, from the subjective and personal sanctum of each person's heart, and flow outward to embrace society as a whole. Each individual must come of their own free will to "hunger and thirst" after righteousness, and become a connoisseur of justice and mercy. Decency is not a spike to be driven into the heart of humanity as it were a vampire.
If the non-Islamic world were to decide tomorrow that there was no possibility EVER of living in peace and coexistence with Islam, and that only ethnocide could preserve world freedom, then could Islam really complain about their fate? If it is true that the mujadaheen who dies in defense of Islam gains instant admission to a paradise flowing with rivers of wine and milk and honey and populated by seductive houri virgins, why then the greatest service which the world could render to Islam is to kill each and every Muslim man, woman and child. They would all enter into Muhammad's paradise in one great rush. Imagine such an orgy of blessedness, in one fell swoop! Would such a genocide be sinful, or would it be a supreme religious gift?
War is never moral. At it's best war can only hope to be necessary, unavoidable, expedient.
Can we be certain that there would never be a scenario in which genocide is the lesser of two evils? If we say that genocide could never be sanctioned as a tactic for survival, then why do we endeavor to develop and test weapons of mass destruction? In fact, it seems to me that the United States has been a pioneer in developing the technology of mass destruction. I am told that one nuclear submarine has MORE destructive fire power than ALL the weapons of ALL five years of World War II (both sides) combined. If this is true, than a small crew of men on such a submarine can unleash the destruction of World War II. And there a number of such submarines deployed around the world. So many little World War II's quietly circulating the world in the ocean's cool quiet depths, awaiting the command to surface.
Were we truly horrified by war and killing then we would prefer invasion, slavery, and death to the defilement of bloodshed. Genuine, sincere pacifism, in its purest form would choose enslavement or death over violence.
If faced with the sin of genocide for a year, and the reign of peace and harmony for 1000 years, versus a thousand years of terrorism and guerilla warfare with a clean conscience, then which choice do we make?
Lutheran minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged in 1945 for his part in an assassination attempt on Hitler. Peace-loving Jimmy Carter praises Bonhoeffer highly.
What would happen if the Kaaba in Mecca were destroyed tomorrow with a surgically precise missile strike? Roman forces destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E, led by Titus under Emperor Vespasian. Judaism survived the destruction of their one and only temple by evolving a different mode of worship. Islam would survive the destruction of the Kaaba, I am certain, but the Islam which survived would be a different Islam from the Islam we have known for centuries. In the "Sayings of Muhammed," which are preserved by the oral tradition of the Hadith, there is a prediction that the Kaaba will one day be destroyed. You may read of this in a paperback entitled "The Sayings of Muhammed" (ISBN 0-88001-641-8), translated by Neil Robinson, (Ecco Press), on page 27, a saying of "prophet" Muhammed concerning the Kaaba: "The person who destroys the Kaaba will be "Old Thin Legs", an Abyssinian."
Masada today is one of the Jewish people's greatest symbols. Israeli soldiers take an oath there: "Masada shall not fall again."
Masada was the scene of a mass suicide of Jews circa 72 C.E. They took their own lives rather than fall into the hands of the Romans. Was it really such a bad choice? How many alternative choices were open to them? Today, Israeli solders swear their oath of allegiance at the side of the Masada suicide. Is the suicide of Masada really genocide turned inside out?
Sometimes we make the enemy go away by making ourselves go away. Sometimes we make the enemy go away by killing every man, woman and child, so that the enemy becomes a bad and distant memory. Suicide? Genocide? Genocide as suicide turned inside out? Think about it. Imagine two mirrors face to face, reflecting each other in perfect symmetry. The Romans facing the Jews, the Romans bent on genocide and the Jews resigned to suicide. Suicide and genocide are the same thing seen from different angles.
Elazar ben Yair's final speech, as recorded by the historian Josephus, was a masterful oration:
"Since we long ago resolved," Elazar began, "never to be servants to the Romans, nor to any other than to God Himself, Who alone is the true and just Lord of mankind, the time is now come that obliges us to make that resolution true in practice.... We were the very first that revolted [against Rome], and we are the last that fight against them; and I cannot but esteem it as a favor that God has granted us, that it is still in our power to die bravely, and in a state of freedom. Let our wives die before they are abused, and our children before they have tasted of slavery, and after we have slain them, let us bestow that glorious benefit upon one another mutually." Elazar ordered that all the Jews' possessions except food be destroyed, for "[the food] will be a testimonial when we are dead that we were not subdued for want of necessities; but that, according to our original resolution, we have preferred death before slavery."
And you, dear reader, what is your choice? Do you choose death as a free man over life as a slave? Or, do you turn the problem inside-out and choose the evil of genocide, bartering your immortal soul for the hope of a world free of terrorism for future generations yet unborn?
Sitarm, The reason no one responded is because you have so many ideas going on in this piece all at once. It is hard to know what to address first. I think your deeper ethical point is well-taken and shared by many here. The other reason may be that a number of the examples that you use are typical "horror of Islam" examples that frankly we are sick of answering to. These are examples that true or not are hurled at us with such accustatory force that we know, in truth, we are not being asked to respond. I am not saying you are doing that, but that is how we are treated most often. I will address a couple of those points here simply to let you know that the situation is far more complicated than you may suppose at this time.
The translated books number is innaccurate. I have the stats in my office and will put them up here when I go in (tomorrow, God willing). But there is a UN office who actually tracks this stuff. Their stats say that more books are translated from English (philosophy, literature, political science, etc.,) from English into Arabic and Persian than all books translated into English from all other languages combined. Now add to that mix that most well-educated people in outside the United States speak and read French, German, English, and Spanish in addition to their own languages and you see that the access to insights outside their own culture far exceeds our own. If more books are translated into Spanish, then that statistic must be combined with the other numbers that demonstrate that the United States is fairly well at the bottom of the list of folks who are reading ideas from abroad. You know the old joke...what is a person who speaks 3 languages? Trilingual. What is a person who speaks 2 languages? Bilingual. What is a person who speaks one language? American.
But the real problem is that folks are ready to believe these numbers tossed off in TV talk shows, assumptions about Muslims and Islamic intellectual history, because it all fits into a simple picture of "those inexplicable people over there." So while surely women have been attacked for not veiling, what have we Muslims been saying about it? What have we been doing about these problems ourselves? Your essay seems to assume that we do not care. We have not been fighting the good fight for centuries. Why not take some time to see what we have been doing and we have been saying? Why not take some time to see who we are and what we think is important?
You might be interested in this website I made for my class this past year on the Danish Cartoon issue that ended up growing into a resource for my academic group and their students. It gives a good sense of the diversity of thought out there and some of the critiques that you might find surprising and that you may need to hear.
Clearly you have good intentions, so take this response as an invitation to learn about Muslims from Muslims on Muslim's own terms. Welcome.
Thanks so much for your reply, Ms. Silvers. It is an honor for me to "meet" you on the Internet. As a child I spent so many pleasant hours watching your dad's television show. I shall just quickly dash off some things. Americans are very limited with regard to learning other languages and cultures. When I was in my early 20s, I taught myself enough Greek and Russian to get by, so I would not be quite so American. It is ironic that my two closest Internet friends are a medical student in Tehran, and a writer in Pakistan. Both of these friends feel ambivalence toward Islam, and yearn for things , cultural things, that are not readily available in their own countries. I am reminded of a young Muslim woman who contacted me about 8 years ago, with religious questions. She was dying with cancer, and felt plagued with doubts as to the true religion. I should mention that I myself, raised in the USA with literally with no religion, have become over the years more Hindu-Buddhist in my own beliefs. Anyway, I shall find our correspondence and post it. Her screen name was Yankin. One day, she messaged me to say that things were getting much worse. Then, I never heard from her again. I am sure she passed away. When I was 18, I read Lawrence Durrell's "Alexandrian Quartet". His many scenes from Islamic life prompted me to purchase Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall's "The Meaning of the Glorious Koran" and read it cover to cover, looking up any unknown word in the dictionary. I still have that copy. Durrell's scene where the businessmen hire a blind muezzin to recite Qur'anic passages which brought them to tears was the scene which made me quite curious what this religion might be all about. I am sort of rambling here, without aid of a spellchecker, since my time is limited this morning. I remember watching Huston Smith on PBS educational television, narrating a documentary on world religions. He mentioned that he was raised Methodist (I think, or Presbyterian) and that he would remain with that, but that he had adopted Sufi practices. He quoted the 5th Surah, verse 48 as being one of the most interfaith sentiments (paraphrasing from memory) "If I had wanted to create all peoples as one religion, I could have done so, but for my own reasons, I created you all as different religions. So if you must compete with one another, compete in doing good works, and when you return to me, I shall explain the reasons for the differences in religions." Of course, the very next verse (52 I think) said "Do not be friends with Christians and Jews. They have each other to be friends with. He who is friends with them is one of them and Allah does not help wrongdoers." (again paraphrased from memory). Yes, I want to post here my correspondence with Yankin, and also my very first "debate" in Yahoo with a Muslim who approached me in a religion chat room in 1998. He assumed I was a Hindu in India, and made some rather strong accusations against me, but I came up with a surprising rebuttal which theologically, is quite interesting. I am not trying to "throw something" in anyone's face, though I appreciate how Muslims must feel in this regard. If some of the things I think and feel are unpleasant, yet I am certain there are many in the world who hold even more unpleasant feelings and attitudes, and yet do not, for various reasons, put their thoughts and feelings into words and publicize them. It is healthy for everyone to put their "cards on the table" and be honest and open. I spent much time, from 1998 through 2000, on line, debating both with Protestant Christian fundamentalists and also with Muslims. I made many painful criticisms of Protestant Christian theology, yet never once received a threat. My criticisms of Islam earned me many threats; emails telling me that I would be tortured, and even one adolescent in AOL who announced that he would burn my house down. If you search the Internet for the very earliest artifact of Christianity, you will find that it is a cartoon, a graffiti, on a catacomb wall, depicting Christ on a cross, with the head of a donkey, while someone kneels and prays before it. The caption of the cartoon is "Alexamandros worships his God." One may compare that with the recent controversy over the cartoon of Muhammed. I have a notion to write a piece comparing Salman Rushdie and "The Satanic Verses" with Kazanzakis "The Last Temptation of Christ." Both books were considered insulting by devout worshippers. Yet, to my knowledge, Kazanzakis never feared for his life. Perhaps I am mistaken on this point. I have also written something which compares Rushdie with Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), who was certainly blasphemous in his religious satire. I must say, I admire the Sufis and the writings of Idres Shah. I once visited an Islamic bookstore which carried everything Sunni, Shia, Sufi, even encyclopedia sets of Hadith. In the Sufi section there was one book which argued that Rumi and Ramakrishna were kindred spirits. Of course, Hallaj was the first Sufi martyr, and was martyred by orthodox Muslims for expressing himself in the fashion of Ramakrishna. Thank you for the tolerance to welcome me here and allowing me to express myself. I sincerely believe that it is possible to discuss even the most painful and sensitive of matters in a civil or even eloquent fashion, if one chooses words carefully enough. Please do notify me immediately regarding any sentence or paragraph which you find truly objectionable or intolerable.
I hope you will stick around and read the entries on the site and explore other websites. Since you mention the Danish Cartoon business, I hope you'll read the site I referred you to. It is about much more than the Danish Cartoons. There will be no offense taken and no need for toleration. "We're all bozos on this bus." All the issues you point out here and above can be explained with one point in common, Muslims are indeed human like everyone else. Ain't a religious or secular community that hasn't had its beautiful, banal, and ugly moments. Thanks for what you said about my Dad. I miss him very much!
Be well,
Laury
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Deja Fu is the feeling that you have been kicked in the head this way before. --Terry Pratchett
Here, as I promised is an excerpt from what I wrote, which mentions my correspondence with the young Muslim woman in Malaysia, who died of cancer. posted
Sunday, November 25, 2001
I have tried to be very honest in my writings over these past three years. I have spoken often of "equanimity", a balanced and even-keeled spirit which is able to face fortune and misfortune alike with the same calm. Now that I am faced with my own mortality, I cannot say that I fully possess that same calm equanimity which I have praised and recommended here in these writings. I will also confess that frequently suicidal thoughts pass through my mind. The only thing which has really kept me going through difficult times, emptiness, loneliness, a sense of worthlessness and despair... the only thing which has kept me going and given me strength is the daily participation in these dialogues and monologues. When I read and write on the internet in this fashion, I project my mind and spirit out of this miserable body and its circumstances and into a world of ideas, of philosophical and theological drama and suspense. I am WITH Socrates and Gandhi and Ramana Maharshi and Mother Theresa, and many many others. I am in their company and I participate in their adventures and pastimes. And, I am with ALL OF YOU, the readers. I have your association and fellowship. The writings of Viktor Frankl, "Man's Search For Meaning", also contain invaluable advice for those who suffer. Frankl speaks of "that which has been rescued to the past". My early childhood, for example, had many delightful aspects to it (though their was some slight amount of loneliness and illness and suffering which seemed so burdensome at the time, but now seems relatively insignificant). Well, that childhood experience of mine has now been "rescued to the past", in the sense that nothing can erase it or take it away from me. Whenever one is confronted with an inescapable, unavoidable situation, whenever one has to face a fate that cannot be changed, e.g., an incurable disease, such as an inoperable cancer, just then is one given a last chance to actualize the highest value, to fulfill the deepest meaning, the meaning of suffering. For what matters above all is the attitude we take toward suffering, the attitude in which we take our suffering upon ourselves. We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked throughout the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. We needed to stop asking ourselves about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life-daily and hourly. . . . Therefore, it was necessary for us to face up to the full amount of suffering, trying to keep moments of weakness and furtive tears to a minimum. But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. ...I deem it to be a remarkable fact that man, as long as he regarded himself as a creature, interpreted his existence in the image of God, his creator; but as soon as he started considering himself as a creator, began to interpret his existence merely in the image of his own creation, the machine. Nothing and nobody can deprive us of what we have rescued into the past. What we have done cannot be undone. This adds to man's responsibleness. For in the face of the transitoriness of his life, he is responsible for using the passing opportunities to actualize potentialities, to realize values, whether creative, experiential, or attitudinal I would like to express thankfulness and gratitude for the miracle of the INTERNET, which has given me this rare opportunity for three years to stand on a soapbox and address the world, or at least, anyone in the world who has some interest in these matters and who stumbles across one of my pages in a search engine. The Internet and free website space and software has made a GREAT contribution to freedom of speech. It is also a miracle that for only the past 100 years or so have so many of the world's ancient writings been translated into popular languages and made available at a low cost or even free, to a large segment of the worlds population. Also the miracle that so many people around the world have HAD THE OPPORTUNITY to receive an education, become literate, and read those books. A few years ago, I was sitting in a large bookstore at a table, and a native African came and sat at the same table. He had a copy of the Qur'an AND a copy of the Bible. I could not resist the temptation to ask him WHY he had those two books, and what he was looking for. He explained to me that he was raised Muslim in Africa, but never learned Arabic and did not understand what the Qur'an really said. He felt doubts about the truth of religion, and he wanted to compare the Qur'an and the Bible, and sort things out for himself. Universal education (literacy) and inexpensive books and free libraries make such personal inquiries possible.
My thoughts frequently go back three years ago, to a young woman in Malaysia, in her early twenties, whom I met in a Yahoo religion chat room. Her screen name was Yankin. She was dying of cancer. She had been raised Muslim, but was experiencing doubts and uncertainty as to which might be the "true religion". She wanted to question and explore. At that time, three years ago, I was not so outspoken in my criticism of Islam. I did not try to influence her in any one direction. I simply listened. We corresponded frequently over a period of several months. She finally wrote to me that she had settled upon Islam, and found some peace of mind. I respected her choice then, and I still respect it today, despite my criticisms of Islam. One must respect the choices of the dying which give them peace. Her last email to me indicated that she was suffering greatly. She was quite constipated, and could not have a bowel movement for a week at time. When she did try, she experienced much bleeding. We should feel gratitude each and every day for the simple humble miracles of normal kidney and bowel function. We are not always conscious of and thankful for the "paradise" which such bodily functions give us, but we certainly become conscious of the HELL AND TORMENT which we experience when such normal bodily functions fail. Yankin mentioned that she was traveling to a different city to try some "alternate medicine", naturopathic, homeopathic. People become desperate at the end and will try anything. I am quite certain that she died shortly after that last email. I remember you, Yankin! We never met. All we had were words on a screen. But we communicated, and shared something of our souls. This is the miracle of words! With words on a screen, we can share our souls, and those words may live on, long after our bodies are gone, sharing our souls with others. This is the miracle of "The Flesh Become Word".
And here also, as I promised, is a link to the very first "debate" that I had with a Muslim, named Titanium, in a Yahoo religion chat room, around 1998.
http://www.members.aol.com/Sitaram/page009.htm
It is a rather crudely edited (or I should say unedited) transcript of my side of the conversation.
He presumed that I was a Hindu in India, and he flamed/trolled me with allegations that Hindus rape lower caste women. My rebuttal was to point out that, in the Hebrew Genesis account, it might be argued that Hagar had no freewill consent in the matter of Ishmael's conception.
I offer this not to debate these theological points but to illustrate how tensions began to arise on the Internet in the late nineties between Muslims and non-Muslims. The more aggressively I was attacked on-line by such Muslims, the more hostile I became, and the deeper I dug into the Qur'an and Hadith to find ammunition for rebuttal and counter-attacks.
In those times, I used a similar style of refutation against the aggressive attacks of Protestant fundamentalists, who would attack in the same fashion as Titanium, my Muslim interlocuter. I wanted to hold up a mirror to those Protestants, to show them how ungly they are in their rhetoric, and how they might equally well be percieved and portrayed as evil in their doctrines and practices.
This was all in the days before blogging. I may possibly have been one of the first to post such debates on the Internet in a regular fashion, using simple html and a free Geocities website. Perhaps I am mistaken and there was someone to beat me to the punch, but I like to think I was among the first to engage in such posting activity.
Flaming and on-line debates are never very useful ways to find intelligent discussion mates. It tends to the folks who like to fight and do not like to learn from each other. We hope you'll learn from our posts here. It would be great if you started reading some of what we've been saying here and related sites and so directly engage us. Then it will be easier for us to engage you once we've got some common ideas under our belts. I hope you'll find it a humane experience.
We'd love to engage with you, but you are going to need to engage with us. If not, I think you will find that you get as few responses as you did on other sites. This has to be a conversation not a monologue.
Just a hint, too, no one reads really long posts no matter how interesting they are.....
Ms. Silver, I do sense your anxiety that I shall perhaps spam my thoughts, and neglect to read this entire site.
I give you my solemn assurance that I shall little by little read through all the posts and links with an open mind.
I hope it will not be an imposition if I blog my thoughts here freely as they come to me.
The nature of these blogs at your site seems to be unimposing, in the sense that people will come and read only if they choose, unlike a message board forum where threads will bulge with numerous posts. If I am mystaken in this assumption please let me know.
I was so fascinated by Mr. Hasan's post (though he points out he is not the author of the idea), namely, that there is room in Islam to forge a practice of non-violence based on the words of Abel to Cain.
I love playing around with theology in such a fashion.
No one here should feel some anxiety to "engage" me in some fashion. Only post if the spirit moves you.
I have no aspirations to convert anyone to anything, or to even argue.
I watched a long Bill Moyers documentary on PBS television on the Hebrew Book of Genesis, with a discussion panel that included a Muslim woman, as well as a Roman Catholic, and Episcopalean, a Rabbi, etc.
The first remark of the Muslim woman was, "Well fortunately, I do not need to deal with any of these issues in Genesis, since my Islamic faith rejects these scriptures as corrupted." (paraphrased from memory, but that is the essence of what she said.) So I realize that no devout Muslim will seriously debate anything from foreign scriptures.
I am close to age 60, and I don't think that anyone is likely to convert me to Islam, or any other religion, at this stage of the game. I have personally come to see all organized religion, being a human creation, as something corrupt and corruptible, though I respect the need that others feel for such organized religion and authority figures.
I am intrigued by the dilemma between "progressive Islam" which, if I read between the lines means some attempt at "reform", and the position of interpreters of the Qur'an that it is set in stone and not subject to reform or interpretation.
In a sense, I see the Sikh religion as a 16th century attempt by Guru Nanak to reform Islam as well as Hinduism, and unite them as well, into a form of monotheism purged of the faults of both religions.
I do hope that no one reading will feel that I am throwing down some kind of gauntlet of a challenge. And, don't feel obligated to reply simply for the sake of replying. Silence is also golden.
Besides, if these posts get into the search engines, then perhaps other members shall be attracted here, with various honorable agendas, and they will be impressed that you can tolerate the posts of an old kafir like me.
Actually, I was the author of that particular idea. My comment on your myspace was because I couldn't find any reference there to anything I'd written.