A Muslim family in America. Source: The New York Times.

Today’s New York Times has a front-page article titled “U.S. Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?“

The family described in the article seems perfectly nice, so I’d like to answer that question with an unqualified “yes.”

But sadly, the truthful answer is, “yes and no.”

To the extent that Muslims adopt Western culture, customs, values, and behaviors, yes, they do indeed belong. A society is a group of people who share those things.

And there’s the rub. Whatever its merits or demerits as a religion, Islam is not a significant part of Western history and culture except as an antagonist. Muslims stand outside the Western tradition.

It’s important to understand what that means and what it does not mean.

It does not mean that Muslims are bad people or that they are necessarily our enemies. It does not mean that they can’t contribute to our society and be accepted in most contexts. It doesn’t even mean that Islam itself has nothing to offer us in religious insights or examples of faith and courage.

What it does mean is that by their answer to one of the most important questions of life, “What’s it all about,” Muslims stand apart. They do not belong. And depending on how they interpret their faith, it means that they disagree with some of Western civilization’s fundamental conclusions about justice, individual rights, freedom of religion, the role of government, and the relationship between humanity and God.

It also means that most Western people will regard them with just a little bit of doubt. The more values and beliefs that people share, the more they feel confident that they understand each other and can trust each other. Don’t blame me for it: that’s just the fact. There are both valid and invalid reasons for it.

And it has nothing specific to do with Islam. It applies to all differences between people. The more extensive and important the differences, the greater is the potential for distrust, misunderstanding, and hostility.

Difference is not a license to treat anyone with less than the respect and love that all people deserve. But it’s foolish to pretend that the difference doesn’t exist.

Alexander Pope's Essay on Man

Let’s take a break from current events to contemplate some truths that will out-last the next news cycle.

You’ve probably heard this quote, but you might not know its source:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast.

That’s the only line most people know from “Essay on Man” by the English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744). The more complete version of the quote hints at the wisdom contained in the rest of the poem:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be, blest.

In other words, people are never satisfied with what they have. We always hope for a “blessing” that is yet to come. Rich people want to be richer, or to be loved; tyrants want more power; humble people wish for more material comforts or security. What we have is seldom good enough for us. We always want more, and we think ourselves ill-used because we don’t have it yet.

Pope’s “Essay” is replete with such insights, beautifully and often poignantly expressed.

About the complexity of human nature, he writes:

What would this man? Now upward will he soar,
And little less than angel, would be more;
Now looking downwards, just as grieved appears,
To want the strength of bulls, the fur of bears.

But Pope has a prescription for all that discontent:

Presumptuous man! The reason wouldst thou find,
Why form’d so weak, so little, and so blind?
Ask of thy mother earth, why oaks are made
Taller and stronger than the weeds they shade.

Then say not man’s imperfect, Heaven in fault;
Say rather, man’s perfect as he ought.

Who finds not Providence all good and wise,
Alike in what it gives and what it denies?

Pope recommends an attitude of serenity and acceptance toward things we can’t control. In this, he anticipates the serenity prayer written by 20th-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr:

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

Pope  saw that people are not merely thinking beings, as some contemporary writers insist. They are also buffeted by self-love, emotion, and instinct that bias their judgment:

Two principles in human nature reign:
Self-love, to urge, and Reason, to restrain.

Self-love and Reason to one end aspire,
Pain their aversion, pleasure their desire;
But greedy that its object would devour,
This taste the honey, and not wound the flower.

If only the executives of BP had used their reason to “taste the honey without wounding the flower,” the Gulf of Mexico wouldn’t have been damaged by BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill. But like all of us, the people running BP fought an internal battle. In their case, the battle was joined between self-love (the desire for more, more, and more profit regardless of consequences) and reason (understanding the importance of protecting the Gulf, its people, and its other living creatures).

The same principle applies to Wall Street banksters who wrecked the world economy. In a different way, it applies to politicians who lead their countries into wars of aggression to enrich themselves and their friends by destroying other nations and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Even if it’s sometimes hard to overcome self-love, reason gives us the ability to see and do the right thing:

This light and darkness in our chaos join’d,
What shall divide? The God within the mind.

But we need to be careful how we live and what we do, because repeated exposure to evil can make it seem normal:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

Every person is vulnerable to the siren song of self-love, so we must be on our guard against it:

Virtuous and vicious every man must be,
Few in the extreme, but all in the degree;
The rogue and fool by fits is fair and wise;
And even the best by fits what they despise.

Pope alludes to the joys and the brevity of human life:

Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law,
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite.
Scarfs, garters, gold amuse his riper stage,
And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age.
Pleased with this bauble still, as that before,
Till tired he sleeps, and life’s poor play is o’er.

What insight he packs into those eight lines! All through our lives, one trifle after another catches our attention. Shallow and stupid as they often are, such trifles fill our days with joy. And though the toys get more expensive as we get older, mostly they’re still just toys, whatever ponderous nonsense we tell ourselves about them. We love them not because they’re precision instruments, or because they’re important, but simply because they make us happy.

We occupy ourselves with rattles, then romance, and early or late with religion. At the end, as Shakespeare says, we fly away to “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns,” our life’s poor play over at last. And we barely pause to take a bow before the curtain falls on our little drama:

Hope humbly, then; with trembling pinions soar,
Wait the great teacher, Death, and God adore.
What future bliss, He gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.

We live with our little joys for the moment and with our giant hope for the future. It’s less poetic than Pope, but “what’s not to like?”

“You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” wrote newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst to his reporter in Cuba in 1898.

Hearst was using his news media empire to promote a war against Spain so that the United States could seize the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. And just as with the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, a false-flag attack (the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine) was used to create a casus belli.

The rulers of countries have traditionally used news media to promote wars. Under the Bush-Cheney regime, The New York Times and cable news shows constantly promoted false stories about “threats” by Iraq against the United States, just as they currently hype false stories about the supposed threat posed by Iran.

The goal was and is to provide a pretext for aggression against those countries. It doesn’t do any good for the American people, for the soldiers on both sides who are wounded or killed, or for the non-combatants in those countries who are slaughtered. But it lets slimy politicians pose as heroes: “war prezadents,” as Dubya Bush put it. It does lots of good for weapons manufacturers and other war profiteers. And it does lots of good for the government officials and their friends who loot the conquered countries, and into whose pockets that loot disappears.

Two recent events prompted those thoughts.

First, I was sitting in a coffee shop drinking coffee and doing some work. As usual in such places, there were several television screens tuned to “news” shows. One of the screens is always tuned to Fox News, where the hosts typically agitate for war, push ever more tax cuts for the rich, and debate about whether President Obama hates all Americans or just white people.

Another screen was tuned to the Headline News Network (HLN), which seems like a news version of the Lifetime cable TV channel: if I recall Lifetime’s slogan, “television for women, and men are no damn good.”

Cable TV News Is Not Serious

TV hostess Jane Velez-Mitchell (left) interviews comedienne Lily Tomlin.

One of the talk-show hostesses, Jane Velez-Mitchell, looks like a cartoon caricature of an overly made-up and coiffed celebrity. Her perpetually pursed lips make her look like she just swallowed a bug and is trying to cough it up.

If you go to the CNN Web site, you can find out more than you ever wanted to know about Ms. Velez-Mitchell, including her “lifelong battle with alcoholism” and the fact that she recently came out as a lesbian (mazel tov). And in fairness, I found out why her lips look so weird: she was born in 1955, which makes her 54 years old, and she’s undoubtedly “had a little work done.” She does look pretty good for 54: I wouldn’t have guessed she was that old. Her shows typically deal with celebrities, nasty divorce cases, custody disputes, and lurid insinuations that someone might or might not have kidnapped a child / murdered a cheerleader / and so forth.

Nancy Grace

The other notable hostess is Nancy Grace, a former prosecutor with a trademark sneer who seems like a pretty nasty piece of work. After being cited several times for ethical misconduct as a prosecutor, Grace became a TV commentator. Her shows cover pretty much the same ground as Ms. Velez-Mitchell’s, albeit with a meaner edge.

The first time I ever heard of Ms. Grace was in 2006, when she used her show to browbeat a mother whose two-year-old child had disappeared. The day after Grace insinuated on her TV show that the mother was involved in the disappearance, the mother committed suicide. Grace also hyped a prosecutor’s false accusations that Duke University lacrosse players had raped a black stripper. Later, the accused players were exonerated and the prosecutor who brought the charges was disbarred for misconduct. But Ms. Grace walked away clean, her trademark sneer intact.

Cable TV News Hypes a “Threat” from North Korea

What brought all this to mind was the headline that the HLN channel flashed this morning along the bottom of the TV screen: “North Korea threatens U.S., South Korea with nuclear deterrence.”

What?! North Korea is threatening us? Why, those cheeky little yellow bas**rds! We’d better attack them right away so they don’t threaten us anymore.

Take a breath, people. North Korea is “threatening us with deterrence.” In other words, if we attack them, they’ll counter-attack. The nerve of those foreign devils!

Of course, we could just not attack them, but what would be the fun (and profit) in that?

The Moral Equivalent of War

"Pragmatism and Other Essays" by William James.

The second thing that led me to these musings was an essay I read last night by William James (1842 – 1910) and titled “The Moral Equivalent of War.” James, an American philosopher / psychologist who taught at Harvard and was “the father of American psychology,” is too little known these days. His essays “Human Immortality” and “The Will to Believe” are classic statements of a rational basis for Judeo-Christian religious faith.

In “The Moral Equivalent of War,” James surveys the psychology that leads to war:

We inherit the warlike type … Dead men tell no tales, and if there were any tribes of other type than this, they have left no survivors. Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won’t breed it out of us. The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of wars.

But, James notes, we have a problem. Civilization has made us increasingly aware of the conflict between our actions and the moral principles we profess:

At the present day, civilized opinion is a curious mental mixture. The military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever, but we are confronted by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom. Innumerable writers are showing up the bestial side of military service.

And then he gets to the point most relevant today:

Pure loot and mastery seem no longer morally avowable motives, and pretexts must be found for attributing them solely to the enemy.

You see? It’s not that our rulers wanted to conquer and loot Afghanistan and Iraq. They attacked us! Well, they didn’t attack us, but they wanted to. Or planned to. Or might have at some point in the future. So we had to attack them first.

It recalls a comment made by another American writer, Mark Twain, in Letters from the Earth:

So what do you think of the human mind? I mean, in case you believe that there is a human mind.

I believe that there is a human mind, but some days, I wonder about it a bit.

Some Americans react with hostility to Muslim attire. Source: The New York Times.

Unenlightened Americans are being mean to Muslim women.

That’s the central message of “Behind the Veil,” an article in the Styles section of this morning’s New York Times.

And the article is correct: A few Americans are indeed being mean to Muslim women.* Gratuitous meanness is unenlightened.

But let’s reflect for a moment about the article’s contention (with which I agree) that the meanness is gratuitous.

The article recounts the troubles of Hebah Ahmed, a woman who started wearing a Muslim veil after the 9/11 attacks that were blamed on Muslim terrorists from Saudi Arabia.

The veil, called a hijab, covers Muslim women’s faces and bodies, though part of the face is left uncovered so that they can see where they’re going. Ms. Ahmed’s veil provoked strong reactions from some Americans:

Hebah said she has been kicked off planes by nervous flight attendants and shouted down in a Wal-Mart by angry shoppers who called her a terrorist. Her sister was threatened by a stranger in a picnic area who claimed he had killed a woman in Afghanistan “who looked just like” her. When she joined the Curves gym near her home in Edgewood, N.M., some members threatened to quit. “They said Islamists were taking over,” Ms. Ahmed said.

The Heckler’s Veto

What the article describes is called a “heckler’s veto.” Ms. Ahmed is having trouble because other people object to her attire and its Muslim affiliation.

The premise of a heckler’s veto is that if an idea offends anyone in a speaker’s audience, then the offended person can shout at the speaker to stop him or her from stating the idea. The heckler’s veto was on display last year, when Republican Party operatives disrupted legislators’ “town hall meetings” to prevent them from explaining health care reform to their constituents.

To her critics, Ms. Ahmed’s veil symbolizes terrorism, an alien religion, and a threat to Western society. They would like to exercise their heckler’s veto to prevent her from bringing that symbol into their presence, whether it’s on a plane or in a grocery store.

Ms. Ahmed and other peaceful Muslims, of course, argue that the hijab and other Muslim customs do not symbolize terrorism to them. They symbolize merely a religious tradition and its customs.

Both sides have a point. Rightly or wrongly, Ms. Ahmed’s critics are offended by her Muslim attire and what it symbolizes to them. Ms. Ahmed counters that she means to convey no such message and that her critics’ interpretation of her attire is different from hers. They think that her hijab is an in-your-face endorsement of terrorism. She thinks that it’s merely a statement of piety.

Her critics suspect that her avowals of peace and piety are just a smokescreen. They believe that she secretly endorses terrorism and war on the West. She denies it.

Because both sides have legitimate arguments, one can decide the dispute either way. In America, we have decided that freedom of expression should override a heckler’s veto.

Well, sometimes. Let’s consider another case where the same issue is involved.

The Confederate Flag

The Confederate Battle Flag. Source: Wikipedia.

In the 19th century, Southern states tried to secede from the United States because the Union government’s economic policies favored the industrial north at the expense of the agrarian south. Slavery was an issue, but a minor one. Slavery was legal in both Southern and Northern states. Although U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s “emancipation proclamation” is widely thought to have freed all American slaves, it applied only to Confederate states, where Mr. Lincoln had no legal authority. It said nothing about ending slavery in the Union states over which Mr. Lincoln actually had at least some legal jurisdiction.

Based on the U.S. Constitution, the Southern states argued that they had a right to secede from the Union. But their Constitutional argument was crushed by the superior military power of the Union, which invaded and subjugated the Confederate states.

As a result, many Americans in former Confederate states see the Confederate flag as a symbol of their “lost cause,” and of the principles of the original U.S. Constitution that decentralized most power to the states.

But those flag supporters have their critics. Critics argue that the Confederate flag is merely a racist symbol affirming white superiority over black people and denying the evils of slavery. Seen that way, the Confederate flag is deeply offensive to African-Americans and to anyone else who believes (as I do) that people of all races are equal in rights and human dignity.

So this is another case in which a symbol’s supporters claim that it means only good things to them. Its critics suspect that the supporters are really motivated by hatred and racism, but that they are concealing those motives behind high-sounding rhetoric about the Constitution and states’ rights.

In the case of Muslim attire and practices, received wisdom rejects the heckler’s veto. Polite society accepts Muslim symbols as meaning what nice Muslims like Ms. Ahmed say that they mean. Anyone who doubts it is considered to be a narrow-minded hater.

Yet in the case of the Confederate flag, received wisdom embraces the heckler’s veto. Polite society accepts the flag as meaning what its critics say that it means. Anyone who defends it is considered to be a narrow-minded hater.

Threatened by boycotts and federal sanctions, Southern state legislatures have acted against the wishes of majorities to remove Confederate imagery from flags and to ethnically cleanse building and street names of references to Confederate heroes. Students wearing T-shirts with the flag are sent home from school to change clothes. Any public display of the flag is subject to harassment, violence, and even (rarely) arrest. Why? Because hecklers might be offended by the flag.

What’s the Difference?

The inconsistency most likely arises because Muslims in America, whatever their merits or demerits, are an “official victim” group against which it is socially and legally unacceptable to hold any bias.**  Their hecklers, on the other hand, are just plain vanilla Americans, with no special status or rights.

In the dispute over the Confederate flag, however, the roles are reversed. Supporters of the disputed symbol are just plain vanilla Americans with no special status or rights. Their hecklers are members of, or profess to act on behalf of, an aggrieved official victim group (African-Americans).

——————————————–
* Not as mean as some Muslim men are to Muslim women, but it’s still wrong.

** It serves the interests of the U.S. government to handle its domestic Muslim population gently, lest American Muslims be driven by mistreatment to make common cause with their co-religionists in Muslim countries currently under attack or occupation by U.S. military forces.

Miscellaneous thoughts while drinking coffee at McDonalds:

Look for the money

The Dow dropped by 1,000 points in just a few minutes on Thursday, then rallied. The Sgt. Schultzes at the Securities and Exchange Commission profess to be baffled about the cause.

My advice: look for the money. Running the market up and down is a classic method that big players use to make money at the expense of smaller investors.

Maybe they did it this time, maybe they didn’t. But with their enormous resources, insider knowledge, and computerized trading, they have the ability to do it. And they are not known for their keen moral sense.

If some investment bank or hedge fund walked away from the “glitch” and ended up billions of dollars richer, then it’s worth investigating.

France affirms it’s a society

Muslims and civil libertarians are enraged that France has banned public wearing of the burqa, a full-body covering that fundamentalist Muslims (but not all Muslims) require their wives and other female family members to wear in public.

There are valid arguments for and against the ban. But the fundamental point, in my view, is that a society is defined and united by its rules and mores, both written and unwritten.

A society in which anyone is allowed (by law or social custom) to do whatever he or she wants is not a society. It’s a “libertarian paradise” of disconnected individuals who have nothing in common and no mutual obligations except to refrain from shooting each other.

France has just reaffirmed that it is a society with shared mores and values that aliens (whether ethnic, national, cultural, or religious) must respect.

If fundamentalist Muslims don’t like that society, then they should consider moving to another country that embodies their values and mores. There are lots of choices.

“Into Thy Hands I Commend My Spirit.”

Those are “The Seven Words” that Luke 23:46 tells us Jesus uttered as he died on the cross. This Easter weekend, radio stations have been burning up the airwaves playing Joseph Haydn’s composition based on that theme, even though the words are more appropriate to Good Friday, when Jesus died, than to Easter, when Christians believe he was resurrected.

But one need not be a Christian to find those words inspiring and encouraging. Abandoned by his friends and followers, dying in agony and apparently alone, repudiated and facing what most men would consider the worst possible catastrophe, Jesus said:

Into Thy hands I commend my spirit.

Those are the words that inspired Haydn (1732-1809) to compose “The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross” (Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze). In his Bible, Haydn read those words in German:

Ich befehle meinen Geist in deine Hande.

Those are not words of death, but of life. They tell us of a God who commands us to love and help each other instead of hating and killing each other. When the original text of Luke’s Gospel was written in Greek, the author told us that Jesus said:

εἰς χεῖράς σου παρατίθεμαι τὸ πνεῦμά μου.

Those words tell us that God made the world with a purpose and that we are part of that purpose. They answer the question asked by Psalm 8:4-5, “What is man, that Thou art mindful of him, And the son of man, that Thou visitest him?” They tell us that we are God’s very junior partners in creation. That our lives matter. That what we do in life makes a difference.

They tell us of a God Who knows each of us better than we know ourselves. Of a God Who loves us and cares about our well-being.

Into Thy hands I commend my spirit.

With all due respect to Haydn, he left something out. The seven words are important, that’s true. But they’re part of a larger statement and a much bigger picture. What Luke actually tells us that Jesus said is:

Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.

Father. That word tells us that God, the Creator of the universe and the Source of all life, is not remote, uninvolved, or uncaring. He is not the unmoved mover of Aristotle, the deus sive natura of Spinoza, or the “absentee landlord” of whom Al Pacino spoke in the film “Devil’s Advocate.” He dwells in our lives and in our hearts, in good times and bad, in our triumph and our loneliness, when we wake and when we sleep, when we are born into this world and when we leave it.

Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.

This Easter day, and every day, let us remember those words and commend our own spirits to our Father in Heaven — not so that we can die, but so that we can live as the people we were meant to be. Let us remember the example of a man who was far better than we are, who told us to embrace each moment joyfully and use it for the best. Let us walk with God, as He walks with us.

Once upon a time, it was the Carthaginians who were coming to get you. Or the Etruscans. Or the Spartans. Or the French. Or the Germans. Or the Japs. Or the Spanish. Or the Catholics.

For most of the 20th century, it was the Godless Commies who were hiding under every bed. They worked tirelessly, so we were told, to subvert all that was free and good in our societies. They infiltrated the schools to poison the minds of our young. They infiltrated the labour unions to cripple industry. And they agitated for so-called “civil rights” to foment rioting and “uppitiness amongst the Negroes.”

Since the Bush-Cheney regime’s signature event of “9/11,” it’s been the Heathen Muslims who are out to get us. They’re not Godless, but they’re even worse: they really believe in all that religion stuff. They take it seriously. And they’re every bit as sneaky as the Godless Commies: anyone could be a secret Muslim, and probably is. They’re infiltrating your neighbourhood. They’re building mosques. They’re recruiting the blacks. They’re plotting mayhem. They’re comin’ to gitchya, and they’re gonna take yer wimminfolk, too.

Oh, Good Lord, do we have to go through this homicidal foolishness yet again with another so-called “enemy”? I guess that we do.

“The Other” Is Always Out to Get You

All people have evil impulses: that’s part of being human. In the Jewish tradition, the impulse to evil is called yetzer hara , while the impulse to good is called yetzer hatov. In Christianity, the impulse to evil is embodied in the idea that man is a “fallen” being who is not good by default, like the angels, but who must choose good over evil. For Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, our impulses to evil were in the part of our minds called the Id, while moral conscience was in the superego. These concepts even found their way into popular culture, in classic science fiction movies such as “Forbidden Planet,” about which I will say no more because everyone should see it and I don’t want to spoil the ending. In terms of evolutionary biology, we inherit amoral animal impulses from our pre-human ancestors.

We dislike finding these evil impulses in ourselves. They make us feel ashamed, so we often try to deny that we have them.* One way to deny it is to attribute them to somebody else, via a psychological process called projection. Transactional analysis, a modern popularization of Freud, calls this strategy I’m OK, You’re Not OK. The group to which we attribute our own evil impulses is called the other.

Psychologically, the other is a group of people on whom we project all of our own undesirable qualities: our aggression, lust, dishonesty, irrationality, envy, and so forth. It’s like a film screen on which we watch the horror movie of our own worst and most frightening selves.

We use the other group as a scapegoat for our own sins and shortcomings. By doing so, we symbolically cleanse ourselves of evil and achieve self-esteem. But even if it makes us feel good about ourselves, demonizing the other makes us perceive it in wildly unrealistic and negative terms.

The situation becomes even more dangerous if we can talk ourselves into attacking and killing the people in the other group. Because we see those people as a symbol of our own evil impulses, we see destroying them as a symbolic way to destroy the evil in ourselves. Unfortunately, such acts of aggression mean that we are following our evil impulses instead of eliminating them.

In the West, many people perceive Muslims as “the other.” The situation is complicated by the fact that many Muslims see us as “the other.” Each group attributes only the best, most peaceful motives to itself and only the worst, most aggressive motives to the other. The only way we’re ever going to live in peace is for each group to achieve some realistic understanding of the other group. Freud would say that we need to move beyond seeing each other as psychological symbols of our own projected evil, and see each other instead as real human beings.

Islamic Courts: Coming Soon to Your Town?

The most recent alarms about Islam were raised in a September 14, 2008 article in The (London) Sunday Times. That article was followed two months later by a November 19th New York Times article about the increasing number of Islamic courts in Great Britain and the existence of similar courts in the United States.

According to The Sunday Times:

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence. … Previously, the rulings of sharia courts in Britain could not be enforced, and depended on voluntary compliance among Muslims.

The follow-up article in The New York Times added that:

But ever since the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, called in February for aspects of Islamic Shariah to be embraced alongside the traditional legal system, the government has been grappling with a public furor over the issue. [In addition,] Courts in the United States have endorsed Islamic and other religious tribunals, as in 2003, when a Texas appeals court referred a divorce case to a local council called the Texas Islamic Court.

To their credit, both newspapers mention, though without emphasis, three facts that are vital in determining how much of a “threat” Islamic courts are to Western political and legal rights. They leave out a fourth, historical fact that’s also relevant.

Fact #1: Islamic Courts are legally equivalent to arbitration

First, the Islamic courts offer services that are legally equivalent to arbitration — nothing more. Arbitration is a cheaper, faster alternative to trying cases in court. If both parties agree to binding arbitration, then the arbitrator’s decision has the force of law — in Britain, it falls under the Arbitration Act of 1996. That much has nothing to do with Islamic courts. It applies to everyone. In Britain, as in other countries, private arbitrators can decide cases that otherwise might go to court. Sometimes, the private arbitrators are Islamic scholars, but they’re just applying an already-existing law.

In addition, people who take their disputes to arbitration (Islamic or not) go because they agreed to do so. No one is forced to do it.

The New York Times article begins with the statement: “The woman in black wanted an Islamic divorce.” That case is representative. If you want an Islamic divorce, you can’t get one from secular government courts. The article continues:

Indeed, most of the courts’ judgments have no standing under British civil law. But for the parties who come before them, the courts offer something more important: the imprimatur of God.

Fact #2: They handle only civil cases

Second, they handle only civil cases such as divorce, inheritance, and property disputes. Criminal cases, whether involving Muslims or not, are handled by the mainstream legal system. Islamic law (“Shari’a”) has historically prescribed more severe punishments than modern Western societies consider reasonable, but such cases are not handled by Islamic courts in non-Muslim countries. According to one Islamic jurist quoted in The Times, “All we are doing is regulating community affairs in these cases.”

Fact #3: Other religions have similar courts

The Times notes that:

Jewish Beth Din courts operate under the same provision in the Arbitration Act and resolve civil cases ranging from divorce to business disputes. They have existed in Britain for more than 100 years, and previously operated under a precursor to the act.

So there’s nothing new or unique about Islamic courts. Jewish and Christian courts don’t bother us. The only difference is that we haven’t been conditioned to think of Judaism and Christianity as breeding grounds for terrorists.

Fact #4: Historically, Islamic countries gave similar rights to their own religious minorities

That applies especially to Judaism and Christianity, which Islam regards as its closest religious relatives. Jews and Christians living in Islamic countries are considered dhimmi, that is, “protected people” whose religious practices are officially tolerated by the Muslim state (The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam, p. 117). Dhimmi had to pay a special tax and were subject to restrictions that varied depending on the country. However,  Bernard Lewis, a Princeton University professor who is a world-renowned authority on the Middle East and Islam, writes:

The position of non-Muslims in the Muslim world was in general far better than the position of non-Christians or, still worse, deviant Christians in most Christian countries. … In the Ottoman Empire until the 19th century reforms, dhimmi communities, Jews and Christians of various churches, formed their own communities, under their own heads and subject to their own laws, administered by their own courts, in such matters as marriage and divorce, inheritance, and much else. (Islam: The Religion and the People, pp. 56-57.)

Most Britons and Americans don’t know that, but you can be sure that most Muslims know it. And they see Islamic courts as nothing more than equal treatment.

Islam: Religion of Terrorists?

But isn’t the main problem that Islam is a religion of terrorists?

No. It’s true that some Muslims are terrorists. And it’s true that you can find violent passages in the Qur’an (the Koran). But those things apply equally to Judaism, Christianity, and most other religions.

In any large social or religious group, a minority of people will be prone to violence and hatred. In almost any religious tradition, some elements will be enlightened and some will be barbaric. Here are a few relevant facts:

• When two Muslims greet each other, they say Salam alaykum (“peace be with you”), which is closely related (because Arabic and Hebrew are both Semitic languages) to the Jewish greeting of Shalom aleichem (“peace be with you”).

• The five pillars of Islam are (1) The creed “I testify that there is no God but Allah. I testify that Mohammed is the prophet of Allah.” (2) Prayer; (3) Charity; (4) Fasting; and (5) Pilgrimage. If you do all five of those things correctly, then surprise! You’re considered a Muslim. Notice that “terrorism” is not on the list.

• “Muslim fighters are commanded not to kill women, children, or the aged unless they attack first; not to torture or otherwise ill-treat prisoners; to give fair warning of the opening of hostilities or their resumption after a truce; and to honor agreements.” (Lewis, op cit, p. 151)

• “The emergence of the by now widespread practice of suicide bombing is a development of the 20th century. It has no antecedents in Islamic history and no justification in terms of Islamic theology, law, or tradition. It is a pity that those who practice this form of terrorism are not better acquainted with their own religion.” (Lewis, op cit, p. 153)

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Singer-satirist Tom Lehrer said it best in his song about “National Brotherhood Week:”

Oh, the white folks hate the black folks,
And the black folks hate the white folks.
And the Hindus hate the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews.

It’s not easy to see “the other” as someone just like ourselves. However, if we want to be true to the best lights of our religions and our civilizations, we have to try: Jew, Christian, and Muslim alike, along with Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, and everyone else.

It’s our planet and our societies at issue. We can make them into a heaven or a hell. God, by whatever name we call Him, won’t force us to choose one way or the other. He’s leaving it up to us.

* Freud made the very important distinction between having evil impulses and acting on them. We all have evil impulses: that’s part of our nature. Merely having evil impulses does not make us evil. It’s what we choose to do about our evil impulses that determines our moral status. It’s in the choice to turn away from our evil impulses and follow the path of goodness that we become morally good beings.

I get a little tired of atheists and scientific materialists claiming that they are more reasonable than theists (people who believe in God) because they “don’t take anything on faith.”

All belief systems rest on at least some unproven assumptions and on fundamental concepts that cannot be analyzed into simpler terms. Scientific materialism and atheism are no exception. The problem is not that theism rests on unproven assumptions and atheism doesn’t: both of them rest on unproven assumptions. Instead, the problem is that some of theism’s unproven assumptions contradict those of atheism. As a result, theism and atheism find it difficult to engage in productive debate because each rejects some of the central unproven and unprovable assumptions of the other. Because the assumptions are unproven, debate about them (on both sides) tends to degenerate into emotional appeals and sophistical preaching.

Moreover, we often fail to define what we mean by “theism” and “atheism.” That makes it difficult to argue clearly. Atheism simply means denying that God or gods exist. Everyone is an atheist with respect to some theologies: Christians, for example, deny the existence of Odin and Zeus, though Christian comic-book fans are ambivalent about the existence of Thor. But everyone is a theist in the more general sense of believing in transcendent principles.

Everyone believes, on faith, that there are principles transcending our day-to-day experience, such as the validity of induction and the uniformity of nature. Scientific materialists believe, on faith, that physical science can give a complete and accurate description of reality. As a consequence, they believe that reality is entirely physical. They believe that nothing exists except what can be investigated by traditional scientific methods.* However, there is no scientific way to validate such beliefs: they are articles of faith. When confronted by phenomena that seem to contradict their articles of faith, such as consciousness itself, scientific materialists either ignore the phenomena or dismiss them as somehow unreal. They argue, for example, that when we feel as if we are conscious of anything, it’s simply that our brains are deceiving us. The phrase “arrant nonsense” comes to mind, but perhaps that’s just my brain deceiving me.

It’s true that conventional logical arguments, even those offered by great thinkers such as St. Thomas Aquinas, fail to prove conclusively the existence of God as defined in the Judeo-Christian sense. I would argue, however, that those arguments increase the plausibility of such a belief. For example, evidence that the universe is intelligently designed to support our kind of life is just that: evidence, not proof. If you’re inclined to believe in God, you’ll accept the evidence and conclude that the universe was intelligently designed by God. If you’re inclined to deny God’s existence, you’ll reject the evidence (by a straightforward application of modus tollens) and conclude that the universe was produced by random chance, or perhaps that it is just a very lucky case in an infinite number of universes (the “multiverse” hypothesis).

For me, belief in God hinges on whether or not one is willing to accept evidence that falls outside the traditional definition of “scientific,” that is, insights gained via meditation and other spiritual experiences. William Pepperell Montague, a philosopher at Columbia University, develops this insight very well in his book The Ways of Knowing. Note, however, that assessing the validity of such evidence is not a scientific question: there is no experiment you can do, and no conventional observation you can make, to decide if meditative insight is a reliable guide to knowledge. As a result, scientists have no special expertise in assessing such evidence. They have opinions about it, but they are philosophical opinions that are unsupported by scientific evidence.

Consider a thought-experiment. Suppose that you were designing a virtual reality game and wanted to make it convincing. You would have to make it impossible to prove, from evidence within the game and by the logic of that virtual reality, that anything existed outside of the game. By that analogy, God could be simply a very savvy game designer — very savvy, naturally, because that goes with His being omniscient.

* As a result, some of them get quite bent out of shape over string theory, which is so far resistant to experimental validation.