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Today, I began reading David Nirenberg’s Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in
the Middle Ages and Today, and the attacks in Paris on the offices
of Charlie Hebdo and the all-too-expected violence against Mosques provide an
unsettling and imminent backdrop for what is otherwise some light research
reading. Even if I were not horrified by these propagating acts of violence, my
professional interests would already be raised in light of Salman Rushdie’s
invocation of a “medieval form of unreason” as a way to describe Islamic
radicalism. As many others have noted, the labeling of something as “medieval”
is a comforting fantasy of casting the present (and our own responsibilities to
it) into the darkened past. See this piece for an excellent take on it.
Of course, this event has brought back “The Clash of
Civilizations” (as if it ever left). As a perfect example, Senator Lindsay
Graham has stated that “Our way of life doesn’t
fit into their scheme of how the world should be. If you stopped talking about
radical Islam, if you never did a cartoon again, that’s not enough. What people
need to get is they can’t be accommodated. They can’t be negotiated with. They
have to be eventually destroyed.” It’s them or us.
These stark terms and boundaries, boldly-colored in lines of a
rather cartoonish portrait, obscure the interdependence of Christianity and
Islam. Nirenbeg describes this interdependence as “coproduction,” that
religions coproduce each other in a dense network of identification and
dis-identification. Another phrase he uses here is “ambivalent neighborliness,”
an array of responses to the neighbor “ranging from love and toleration to
total extermination” (2).
Senator Graham and many others would do well to heed Nirenberg’s
analyses concerning the interrelationships between Christianity, Judaism, and
Islam:
My goal in them [the ensuing chapters] is simply to convince you that Islam, Christianity, and Judaism have never been independent of each other: that is as neighbors, in close relation to one another, that they have constantly transformed themselves, reinterpreting both their scriptures and their histories. Their pasts are not discrete, independent, or stable, and neither are their presents or their futures. (12)
Total annihilation can never be good public policy, and
most importantly, it’s a blood-tinged fantasy that ultimately seeks to forget
how much our neighbors mean to us, even (and sadly, perhaps especially) when we
kill them.
2 comments:
Radical Islam in the sense the Senator surely meant is not the same as Islam any more than Nazism was the same as Germany. Radical Islam plays a very similar role in Islam (the civilisation) as Nazism did within Western civilisation -- a modernising revolt against modernity; using an atavistic conception of a warrior past to both revolt against, and adapt to, modernity. In both cases, their ambitions are/were not really negotiable with. Regrettable but true.
Also, the post you linked to is not entirely correct. Is ISIS really so different from the Almohades, or Almoravids, for example?
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