The Alarming Rise of Campus Anti-Semitism. By Joseph Klein. FrontPage Magazine, December 16, 2013.
Klein:
How
does one distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and the camouflaged
form of anti-Semitism that uses the Jewish state and its supporters as
surrogate targets? Natan Sharansky, one
of the founders of the Refusenik movement in Moscow who later emigrated to
Israel and served in various governmental and non-governmental leadership positions,
proposed what he called the 3D test to evaluate rhetoric that purports to be
legitimate criticism of Israel. The line between legitimate criticism and
anti-Semitism manifesting itself with regard to the Jewish state of Israel is
crossed, Sharansky said, when the rhetoric or conduct contains one or more of
the following “3D” components:
1.
Demonization – “For example, the comparisons of Israelis to Nazis and of the
Palestinian refugee camps to Auschwitz. . . .”
2.
Double Standards – “It is anti-Semitism, for instance, when Israel is singled
out by the United Nations for human rights abuses while tried and true abusers
like China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria are ignored.”
3.
Delegitimization – “While criticism of an Israeli policy may not be
anti-Semitic, the denial of Israel’s right to exist is always anti-Semitic. If
other peoples have a right to live securely in their homelands, then the Jewish
people have a right to live securely in their homeland.”
The
3D’s, coupled with physical intimidation, make up the toxic mix that confront
Jewish students on too many U.S. campuses today.
It’s a Man’s World, And It Always Will Be. By Camille Paglia. Time, December 16, 2013.
Camille Paglia Defends Men. By Christina Hoff Sommers. AEI, December 11, 2013.
Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues. By Bari Weiss. Wall Street Journal, December 28, 2013.
The End of Peak Blue: Productivity Up, Future Uncertain. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, December 16, 2013.
Mead:
Productivity increases are almost always a
good thing, but this time, rising productivity hasn’t translated into more jobs
or higher wages. This has happened before, but it wasn’t easy. Can we
transition again?
Unemployment
is high, wages are stagnant, inequality is higher than its been in years, yet
America is as productive as ever. Total productivity—essentially measured by
how much a worker can produce in one hour—has risen substantially over the past
quarter, growing faster than it has since 2009, according to a new Labor
Department report.
This is
both good news and a sign of the trouble we are in. Basically, it is always
good when productivity goes up. Rising productivity means that capitalism is
working: some combination of technology, management and competitive drive is
enabling Americans to get more done—more widgets made, more meals cooked, more
diseases cured—in less time. If absolute poverty is going to be defeated, if
more people are going to be freed from repetitive, meaningless work, if humanity
is going to have more time for art and culture because it spends less time in
drudgery and toil, productivity must continue to rise.
But in
times like ours, the link between productivity and wages looks broken. Back in
Peak Blue, when the post-WWII model of mass production and mass consumption was
working at its best, rising productivity translated very quickly into rising
wages for most workers. Unions used those productivity figures to bargain for
raises, and competitive pressures in a tight labor market forced employers to
offer rising wages along with the trend in rising productivity. There was a
close connection between the productivity level and the wage level.
That
isn’t true today, and it hasn’t been true for the last thirty years. Lots of
factors are at work, but the core issue has been the decline in manufacturing jobs. While the US is more productive than ever in manufacturing, fewer people
have jobs in the field than in 1973. Add that shift to the mass entry of women
into the workforce, throw in high levels of immigration (legal and illegal),
and it is not surprising that wages have stagnated even though productivity has
grown. And there’s another factor; productivity in some service sector jobs is
harder to raise than in manufacturing. It is harder to increase the number of
bedpans per hour that a hospital worker can change than to increase the number
of widgets per hour a manufacturing worker can process.
So does
that mean that the link between capitalism and rising living standards has broken
down for good? There are lots of people who seem to think so, but history
suggests they are wrong. The early Industrial Revolution, for example, was
another period when productivity was rising fast but wages and living standards
for many people were stagnant or falling. (They didn’t keep the same kind of
statistics then that we do today, so direct comparisons are impossible, but the
overall picture seems pretty clear.) In those days, agriculture was shedding
jobs as British landlords shifted from renting small plots at low rents to
subsistence farmers to more profitable but less labor intensive methods of
agriculture like raising sheep. The combination of peasants flocking to the
cities and skilled workers losing their jobs to new automated techniques meant
that more people were looking for fewer jobs. Living standards for many workers
fell sharply, and Britain was convulsed by waves of social unrest.
Making
things worse, huge new fortunes were made both by the landlords getting rid of “excess”
peasants and the factory owners hiring workers (including children) for
pennies. It was not a happy time, and many people looking at England in that
era, including Karl Marx, believed that a social revolution was inevitable.
In the
end, the industrial revolution made pretty much everyone better off in most
ways (though arguably jobs in steel factories and coal mines were neither as
healthy nor as fulfilling as the traditional jobs on the land).
The
information revolution seems to be following a very similar pattern. Old jobs
are disappearing faster than new ones can be created, and rising inequality
combined with stagnant living standards is making people rightly unhappy.
Irritating fortunes are being made while millions of people struggle. Yet the
underlying productivity of society as a whole is going up.
Instead
of fighting a process that offers us and the rest of suffering humanity its
best hope of better living in the medium to long term (and people should never
forget that an information economy is going to be better for the environment
than an industrial one), we should be thinking about how to manage the change
as best we can, and how to accelerate the creation of new jobs in new fields as
the old ones fade away. The key to restoring the link between productivity and
wages so that the rising tide lifts more boats is to increase the demand for
labor. As that happens, wages will rise, competitive pressures to attract good
employees will rise, and workers everywhere will have more bargaining power
when they negotiate with employers, whether through unions or as individuals.
Enabling
more self employment, promoting small business formation and development,
lightening the tax and regulatory burden on job creation and shifting some of
the government’s research focus and capacity from research into agricultural
and manufacturing based fields toward research that benefits the rise of a
job-rich information economy are all things that we can and should be doing.
They don’t even have to cost much money.
Rebuilding
society in the aftermath of a broken social model is a big job, and creating an
advanced information society will require even more social, economic,
ideological and cultural change and development than it took to get from the
Dickensian world of the early industrial revolution to the advanced industrial
democracies of the age of Peak Blue. That’s the job that the Millennials face;
they are one of the special generations in human history that must build a new
world. It’s a high fate and in some ways a hard one, but it also gives a full
scope to their powers of creativity and originality.
Why Israel is boycotted. By Dror Eydar. Israel Hayom, Decmeber 13, 2013. Also at Writing The Wrongs.
Eydar:
1. What
lies at the root of the European boycott of Israel? What lies at the root of
the anti-Israel statements that various cultural icons are constantly making –
statements that camouflage anti-Semitic sentiment? What lies behind the false
and malicious comparison of Israel to South Africa's apartheid regime?
The
attempts to boycott Israel or mark its products, interfere in its ancient
geography or mark it as racist, fascist or Nazi are the current political
expression of Israel’s ancient characterization as “a nation that dwells alone.”
The return to Zion is the Jewish nation’s return to history, to life as a
sovereign people in its ancient homeland. Calls for boycott were made even
before the establishment of the state. While these calls came from the
extremist factions at the time, they moved toward the center as the years went
by, particularly after 1967. That was when we came back to the cradle of our
nationhood, to the historical places most closely connected with our identity.
Most important, we came back to Jerusalem, which is also linked with the
identity of the world’s nations. The fight against Israel – which is a fight
against history’s law of the return to Zion – is evidence of how hard it is for
Israel’s opponents to deal with the Jews’ return to life after having been in a
state of living death for so long. That is why we and our products are marked,
why the badge of shame is being placed upon us once again, why we are being
isolated and boycotted. This is our adversaries’ way of saying: “You are not
one of us.”
2. As Balaam, the prophet hired to curse the
Israelites, looked out over the Israelite tribes gathered on the plains of Moab
just before they entered Canaan, he had a moment of clarity. It was then that
he said: “Behold a people that dwells alone, that is not counted among the
nations.”
I have
just said that he made this statement in a moment of clarity, but it may also
be seen as a sophisticated attempt to isolate the Jews. The main representative
of world culture at that time marked out, with his words, the boundaries of
life for the new nation. Even at our people’s beginnings, the world marked us: “They”
are a people that dwells alone, and we do not count them among us.
We have
done much since that prophecy was uttered. We founded a kingdom and a temple
and set up prophets for ourselves and for the world. As a political entity we
endured two destructions, and hundreds of individual ones until the most
horrific of all seventy years ago in Europe. But never, in word or deed, did we
abandon the hope of returning home, of restoration, of being a free people in
Zion and Jerusalem.
Except
for brief periods of relative calm, the nations of the world did all they could
do isolate and shun us. Jews also marked themselves by their dress and their
customs. The Jewish people lived outside history, acquiring the image of a
people in a living death, with all the significance of that image, for good reason.
We lived on the margins of history and outside it, running for our lives from
place to place.
The
Jewish Haskalah (Enlightenment)
period in the 18th-19th centuries marked a new development. The Jews made an
effort to integrate into society and become contributing citizens. Berlin
became the new Jerusalem. Many proponents of the new movement, called maskilim, assimilated, but many did not,
even though they abandoned religious observance. But more than a century of the
Haskalah led to disappointment in the end. The Jews’ hopes of integration went
unfulfilled. The surrounding society’s fear and abhorrence of Jews who had
blended in, leaving behind all external signs of their Jewishness, only grew
greater.
Some
foreigners take advantage of a society’s goodness without contributing to it.
Sometimes they even work to undermine it or act openly against it. Not so the
Jews of Europe. They tried to be more German than the Germans, more French than
the French. Thousands of Jews died as soldiers in the wars between the empires.
They made contributions in science, culture, commerce, law and politics. But
none of this helped when crisis struck. Once again Jews were marked with the
yellow badge, and even those whose ancestors had assimilated three generations
before were forced to wear it.
The
Zionist movement was a ripe fruit that fell into the hands of thousands of
young people who had left the Egypt of their day, the Jewish shtetl and had no desire to assimilate.
They wanted only to return to the Land of Israel. Now the Promised Land became
an actual destination, and the return to Zion a practical political plan.
3. What
is the founding myth that the West kept before its eyes for two millennia? What
did they see in the streets, on signs, in books, in churches, in the symbols of
their governments? What was it that Westerners saw from birth to death? A
crucified Jew.
With
the advent of the Haskalah, and all the more so that of Zionism, the Jews
sought for the first time in centuries to leave the role Christianity had
prescribed for them – to serve as a living example of the truth of the
Christian faith and as human fodder for the re-enactment of the crucifixion,
through the terrible violence used against them – and re-enter history. The
Jews came down from the cross and sought to live among those who had seen them,
up to that time, through the founding myth of the crucified Jew. As we saw in
the previous century, the attempt failed, ending in unprecedented disaster.
With
Zionism – the completion of the process of coming down from the cross – the
Jewish people's future changed. Jesus came down from the cross, wrapped himself
in his prayer shawl and went back to being a Jew from the Galilee, leaving his
empty image behind in Europe. The establishment of the State of Israel was a
profound disruption of Christian Europe’s founding myth. As if it were not
enough that Jesus came down from the cross, he also went back to his ancient
homeland and took up arms to keep from being crucified again. Even if the power
of religion had waned, the myths through which it shaped the culture of the
European nations had not. They remained the basis of thought and action, and
they are the basis of the current anti-Semitic and anti-Israel acts such as the
boycott against us, the efforts to delegitimize us and the attempt to put blame
parallel to that of the Holocaust upon us.
The
fight against our possession of those parts of Israel that are the most
important to our identity as an ancient nation is a fight against the return to
Zion. It is a struggle against the normalization of the Jew and attempt to “clean
up” – to put the Jew back on the cross so as to return to the old order. From
this perspective, the Palestinians are the spearhead of the global fight of
those who oppose the return to Zion. From such a profound perspective, the
recent agreement in Geneva can also be seen as sacrificing the Jews for peace
and quiet.
But
even as the Europeans think they are getting peace and quiet, they are on the
verge of a crisis. A mighty force has implanted itself in Europe – tens of
millions of non-Christians unwilling to adopt Western culture. In an act of
historical irony, Europe expelled the Jews and Muslims came instead. Now, Europe
stands helpless. The institution of political correctness has left it powerless
and has paralyzed the West's early-warning system there. The decline of the
West that Oswald Spengler wrote about in the 1920s is in full force. Once the
West has declined and fallen, Spengler wrote then, the fellah waits to take over.
But for
Israel, all is not lost. The West, too, has a mighty force – tens of millions
of people who understand that the danger they face affects not only the Jews,
but also their very existence as a civilization. In this fight, Israel serves
as a front-line post against the collapse of the West. Non-acceptance of the
calls for boycott and refusal to wear the new badge of shame are moral
imperatives for every decent human being. The dispute over the Land of Israel
has nothing to do with territory. If it did, we would have resolved the
conflict long ago. This is a fight over identity. The return to Zion is not our
hope only; it is the hope of the entire free world.
How Israel Should Fight Delegitimization. By Eran Shayson. The Jewish Journal, April 28, 2010. Also at The Reut Institute.
Excuse Me, But Israel Has No Right to Exist. By Sharmine Narwani. Al Akhbar English, May 17, 2012. Also at Mideast Shuffle.
FreedumbAndDemocrazy. By Sharmine Narwani. Al Akhbar English, July 6, 2013.
Arabs, Beware the “Small States” Option. By Sharmine Narwani. Mideast Shuffle, July 31, 2013. Also at Al Akhbar English.
Forget Democrazy, Give Me Safe Borders. By Sharmine Narwani. Al Akhbar English, October 31, 2013.
Normalize This! By Remi Kanazi. Video. BDS Movement, November 1, 2012. Also at Poetic Injustice.
BDS is a long term project with radically transformative potential. By Ahmed Moor. Mondoweiss, April 22, 2010.
Israel’s Jewish Character Is Subject for Debate. By Ahmed Moor. The Huffington Post, September 30, 2010.
I am Zionism’s mandatory object. So don’t I get to define it? By Ahmed Moor. Mondoweiss, November 21, 2010.
Israel Simply Has No Right to Exist. By Faisal Bodi. The Guardian, January 2, 2001.
An extremist named Sharmine Narwani finds a home at “Comment is Free.” CiF Watch, February 26, 2013. Also at Huffington Post Monitor. All posts on Sharmine Narwani and User Profile at Huffington Post Monitor.
The Quotable Sharmine Narwani Video. Huffington Post Monitor, March 21, 2011.
Sharmine Narwani Goes on the Offensive. The Brothers of Judea, July 1, 2010.
Sharmine Narwani Calls for the Destruction of Israel. The Brothers of Judea, July 2, 2010.
Narwani [Excuse Me]:
The
phrase “right to exist” entered my consciousness in the 1990s just as the
concept of the two-state solution became part of our collective lexicon. In any
debate at university, when a Zionist was out of arguments, those three magic
words were invoked to shut down the conversation with an outraged, “are you
saying Israel doesn’t have the right to exist??”
Of
course you couldn’t challenge Israel’s right to exist – that was like saying
you were negating a fundamental Jewish right to have . . . rights, with all manner of
Holocaust guilt thrown in for effect.
Except
of course the Holocaust is not my fault – or that of Palestinians. The
cold-blooded program of ethnically cleansing Europe of its Jewish population
has been so callously and opportunistically utilized to justify the ethnic cleansing
of the Palestinian Arab nation, that it leaves me utterly unmoved. I have even
caught myself – shock – rolling my eyes when I hear Holocaust and Israel in the
same sentence.
What
moves me instead in this post-two-state era, is the sheer audacity of Israel
even existing.
What a
fantastical idea, this notion that a bunch of rank outsiders from another
continent could appropriate an existing, populated nation for themselves – and
convince the “global community” that it was the moral thing to do. I’d laugh at
the chutzpah if this wasn’t so serious.
Even
more brazen is the mass ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian
population by persecuted Jews, newly arrived from their own experience of being
ethnically cleansed.
But
what is truly frightening is the psychological manipulation of the masses into
believing that Palestinians are somehow dangerous – “terrorists” intent on
“driving Jews into the sea.” As someone who makes a living through words, I
find the use of language in creating perceptions to be intriguing. This
practice – often termed “public diplomacy” has become an essential tool in the
world of geopolitics. Words, after all,
are the building blocks of our psychology.
Take,
for example, the way we have come to view the Palestinian-Israeli “dispute” and
any resolution of this enduring conflict. And here I borrow liberally from a
previous article of mine. . . .
The
United States and Israel have created the global discourse on this issue,
setting stringent parameters that grow increasingly narrow regarding the
content and direction of this debate. Anything discussed outside the set
parameters has, until recently, widely been viewed as unrealistic, unproductive
and even subversive.
Participation
in the debate is limited only to those who prescribe to its main tenets: the
acceptance of Israel, its regional hegemony and its qualitative military edge;
acceptance of the shaky logic upon which the Jewish state’s claim to Palestine
is based; and acceptance of the inclusion and exclusion of certain regional
parties, movements and governments in any solution to the conflict.
Words
like dove, hawk, militant, extremist, moderates, terrorists, Islamo-fascists,
rejectionists, existential threat, holocaust-denier, mad mullah determine the
participation of solution partners — and are capable of instantly excluding
others.
Then
there is the language that preserves “Israel’s Right To Exist” unquestioningly:
anything that invokes the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and the myths about historic
Jewish rights to the land bequeathed to them by the Almighty – as though God
was in the real-estate business. This language seeks not only to ensure that a
Jewish connection to Palestine remains unquestioned, but importantly, seeks to
punish and marginalize those who tackle the legitimacy of this modern
colonial-settler experiment.
But
this group-think has led us nowhere. It has obfuscated, distracted, deflected,
ducked, and diminished, and we are no closer to a satisfactory conclusion . . . because the premise is wrong.
There
is no fixing this problem. This is the kind of crisis in which you cut your
losses, realize the error of your ways and reverse course. Israel is the
problem. It is the last modern-day colonial-settler experiment, conducted at a
time when these projects were being unraveled globally.
There
is no “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” – that suggests some sort of equality in
power, suffering, and negotiable tangibles, and there is no symmetry whatsoever
in this equation. Israel is the Occupier and Oppressor; Palestinians are the
Occupied and Oppressed. What is there to negotiate? Israel holds all the chips.
They can give back some land, property, rights, but even that is an absurdity –
what about everything else? What about ALL the land, property and rights? Why
do they get to keep anything – how is the appropriation of land and property
prior to 1948 fundamentally different from the appropriation of land and
property on this arbitrary 1967 date?
Why are the colonial-settlers prior to 1948
any different from those who colonized and settled after 1967?
Let me
correct myself. Palestinians do hold one chip that Israel salivates over – the
one big demand at the negotiating table that seems to hold up everything else.
Israel craves recognition of its “right to exist.”
But you
do exist – don’t you, Israel?
Israel
fears “delegitimization” more than anything else. Behind the velvet curtain
lies a state built on myths and narratives, protected only by a military
behemoth, billions of dollars in US assistance and a lone UN Security Council
veto. Nothing else stands between the state and its dismantlement. Without
these three things, Israelis would not live in an entity that has come to be
known as the “least safe place for Jews in the world.”
Strip
away the spin and the gloss, and you quickly realize that Israel doesn’t even
have the basics of a normal state. After 64 years, it doesn’t have borders.
After six decades, it has never been more isolated. Over half a century later,
and it needs a gargantuan military just to stop Palestinians from walking home.
Israel
is a failed experiment. It is on life-support – pull those three plugs and it
is a cadaver, living only in the minds of some seriously deluded foreigners who
thought they could pull off the heist of the century.
The
most important thing we can do as we hover on the horizon of One State is to
shed the old language rapidly. None of it was real anyway – it was just the
parlance of that particular “game.” Grow a new vocabulary of possibilities –
the new state will be the dawn of humanity’s great reconciliation. Muslims,
Christians and Jews living together in Palestine as they once did.
Naysayers
can take a hike. Our patience is wearing thinner than the walls of the hovels
that Palestinian refugees have called “home” for three generations in their
purgatory camps.
These
universally exploited refugees are entitled to the nice apartments – the ones
that have pools downstairs and a grove of palm trees outside the lobby. Because
the kind of compensation owed for this failed western experiment will never be
enough.
And no,
nobody hates Jews. That is the fallback argument screeched in our ears – the
one “firewall” remaining to protect this Israeli Frankenstein. I don’t even
care enough to insert the caveats that are supposed to prove I don’t hate Jews.
It is not a provable point, and frankly, it is a straw man of an argument. If
Jews who didn’t live through the Holocaust still feel the pain of it, then take
that up with the Germans. Demand a sizeable plot of land in Germany – and good
luck to you.
For
anti-Semites salivating over an article that slams Israel, ply your trade
elsewhere – you are part of the reason this problem exists.
Israelis
who don’t want to share Palestine as equal citizens with the indigenous
Palestinian population – the ones who don’t want to relinquish that which they
demanded Palestinians relinquish 64 years ago – can take their second passports
and go back home. Those remaining had better find a positive attitude –
Palestinians have shown themselves to be a forgiving lot. The amount of carnage
they have experienced at the hands of their oppressors – without proportional
response – shows remarkable restraint and faith.
This is
less the death of a Jewish state than it is the demise of the last remnants of
modern-day colonialism. It is a rite of passage – we will get through it just
fine. At this particular precipice in the 21st century, we are all,
universally, Palestinian – undoing this wrong is a test of our collective
humanity, and nobody has the right to sit this one out.
Israel
has no right to exist. Break that mental barrier and just say it: “Israel has
no right to exist.” Roll it around your tongue, tweet it, post it as your
Facebook status update – do it before you think twice. Delegitimization is here
– have no fear. Palestine will be less painful than Israel ever was.
Anti-Semitism and Anti-Americanism. By Josef Joffe. Pew Research, May 5, 2006.
The Axis of Envy. By Josef Joffe. Foreign Policy, No. 132 (September/October 2002).
A World Without Israel. By Josef Joffe. Foreign Policy, No. 146 (January/February 2005).
Debating a World Without Israel. Roundtable. Foreign Policy, No. 147 (March/April 2005).
European Anti-Americanism (and Anti-Semitism): Ever Present Though Always Denied. By Andrei Markovits. Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, August 2005.
Academics Against Israel and the Jews. Edited by Manfred Gerstenfeld. Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2007. Also here.
The Anti-American Century? By Ivan Krastev. Journal of Democracy, Vol. 15, No. 2 (April 2004).
The Myth of Israel as a Colonialist Entity: An Instrument of Political Warfare to Delegitimize the Jewish State. By Dore Gold. Jewish Political Studies Review, Vol. 23, No. 3/4 (Fall 2011).
Among the Bourgeoisophobes. By David Brooks. The Weekly Standard, April 15, 2002.
Why the
Europeans and Arabs, each in their own way, hate America and Israel.
Hollow Men. By Lee Smith. Tablet, July 14, 2010.
Why
Israel’s enemies will always be the darlings of Western intellectuals.
The Counterrevolution in Military Affairs. By Ralph Peters. The Weekly Standard, February 6, 2006.
Faith versus tradition in Islam. By Mustafa Akyol. Video. TED, March 2011. YouTube. YouTube.
Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty. Introduction chapter. By Mustafa Akyol. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.
The White Path: Mustafa Akyol’s website.
Mustafa Akyol. Google Videos.
Akyol (TED Transcript):
A few
weeks ago, I had a chance to go to Saudi Arabia. And the first thing I wanted
to do as a Muslim was go to Mecca and visit the Kaaba, the holiest shrine of
Islam. And I did that; I put on my ritualistic dress; I went to the holy
mosque; I did my prayers; I observed all the rituals. And meanwhile, besides
all the spirituality, there was one mundane detail in the Kaaba that was pretty
interesting for me. There was no separation of sexes. In other words, men and
women were worshiping all together. They were together while doing the tawaf,
the circular walk around the Kaaba. They were together while praying.
And if
you wonder why this is interesting at all, you have to see the rest of Saudi
Arabia because it's a country which is strictly divided between the sexes. In
other words, as men, you are not simply supposed to be in the same physical
space with women. And I noticed this in a very funny way. I left the Kaaba to
eat something in downtown Mecca. I headed to the nearest Burger King
restaurant. And I went there – I noticed that there was a male section, which
was carefully separated from the female section. And I had to pay, order and
eat at the male section. “It’s funny,” I said to myself, “You can mingle with
the opposite sex at the holy Kaaba, but not at the Burger King.”
Quite
ironic. Ironic, and it’s also, I think, quite telling. Because the Kaaba and
the rituals around it are relics from the earliest phase of Islam, that of
prophet Muhammad. And if there was a big emphasis at the time to separate men
from women, the rituals around the Kaaba could have been designed accordingly.
But apparently that was not an issue at the time. So the rituals came that way.
This is also, I think, confirmed by the fact that the seclusion of women in
creating a divided society is something that you also do not find in the Koran,
the very core of Islam – the divine core of Islam that all Muslims, and equally
myself, believe. And I think it’s not an accident that you don't find this idea
in the very origin of Islam. Because many scholars who study the history of
Islamic thought – Muslim scholars or Westerners – think that actually the
practice of dividing men and women physically came as a later development in
Islam, as Muslims adopted some preexisting cultures and traditions of the
Middle East. Seclusion of women was actually a Byzantine and Persian practice,
and Muslims adopted that and made that a part of their religion.
And
actually this is just one example of a much larger phenomenon. What we call
today Islamic Law, and especially Islamic culture – and there are many Islamic cultures
actually; the one in Saudi Arabia is much different from where I come from in
Istanbul or Turkey. But still, if you’re going to speak about a Muslim culture,
this has a core, the divine message, which began the religion, but then many
traditions, perceptions, many practices were added on top of it. And these were
traditions of the Middle East – medieval traditions.
And
there are two important messages, or two lessons, to take from that reality.
First of all, Muslims – pious, conservative, believing Muslims who want to be
loyal to their religion – should not cling onto everything in their culture,
thinking that that's divinely mandated. Maybe some things are bad traditions
and they need to be changed. On the other hand, the Westerners who look at
Islamic culture and see some troubling aspects should not readily conclude that
this is what Islam ordains. Maybe it’s a Middle Eastern culture that became
confused with Islam.
There
is a practice called female circumcision. It’s something terrible, horrible. It
is basically an operation to deprive women of sexual pleasure. And Westerners,
Europeans or Americans, who didn’t know about this before faced this practice
within some of the Muslim communities who migrated from North Africa. And they’ve
thought, “Oh, what a horrible religion that is which ordains something like
that.’ But actually when you look at female circumcision, you see that it has
nothing to do with Islam, it’s just a North African practice, which predates
Islam. It was there for thousands of years. And quite tellingly, some Muslims
do practice that. The Muslims in North Africa, not in other places. But also the
non-Muslim communities of North Africa – the Animists, even some Christians and
even a Jewish tribe in North Africa is known to practice female circumcision.
So what might look like a problem within Islamic faith might turn out to be a
tradition that Muslims have subscribed to.
The
same thing can be said for honor killings, which is a recurrent theme in the
Western media – and which is, of course, a horrible tradition. And we see truly
in some Muslim communities that tradition. But in the non-Muslim communities of
the Middle East, such as some Christian communities, Eastern communities, you
see the same practice. We had a tragic case of an honor killing within Turkey’s
Armenian community just a few months ago.
Now
these are things about general culture, but I’m also very much interested in
political culture and whether liberty and democracy is appreciated, or whether
there’s an authoritarian political culture in which the state is supposed to
impose things on the citizens. And it is no secret that many Islamic movements
in the Middle East tend to be authoritarian, and some of the so-called “Islamic
regimes” such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and the worst case was the Taliban in
Afghanistan – they are pretty authoritarian. No doubt about that.
For
example, in Saudi Arabia there is a phenomenon called the religious police. And
the religious police imposes the supposed Islamic way of life on every citizen,
by force – like women are forced to cover their heads – wear the hijab, the
Islamic head cover. Now that is pretty authoritarian, and that’s something I’m
very much critical of. But when I realized that the non-Muslim, or the
non-Islamic-minded actors in the same geography, sometimes behaved similarly, I
realized that the problem maybe lies in the political culture of the whole
region, not just Islam. Let me give you an example: in Turkey where I come
from, which is a very hyper-secular republic, until very recently we used to
have what I call secularism police, which would guard the universities against
veiled students. In other words, they would force students to uncover their
heads, and I think forcing people to uncover their head is as tyrannical as
forcing them to cover it. It should be the citizen’s decision.
But
when I saw that, I said, “Maybe the problem is just an authoritarian culture in
the region, and some Muslims have been influenced by that. But the
secular-minded people can be influenced by that. Maybe it’s a problem of the
political culture, and we have to think about how to change that political
culture.” Now these are some of the questions I had in mind a few years ago
when I sat down to write a book. I said, “Well I will make a research about how
Islam actually came to be what it is today, and what roads were taken and what
roads could have been taken.” The name of the book is Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty. And as the
subtitle suggests, I looked at Islamic tradition and the history of Islamic
thought from the perspective of individual liberty, and I tried to find what
are the strengths with regard to individual liberty.
And
there are strengths in Islamic tradition. Islam actually, as a monotheistic
religion, which defined man as a responsible agent by itself, created the idea
of the individual in the Middle East and saved it from the communitarianism,
the collectivism of the tribe. You can derive many ideas from that. But besides
that, I also saw problems within Islamic tradition. But one thing was curious:
most of those problems turn out to be problems that emerged later, not from the
very divine core of Islam, the Koran, but from, again, traditions and
mentalities, or the interpretations of the Koran that Muslims made in the
Middle Ages. The Koran, for example, doesn’t condone stoning. There is no
punishment on apostasy. There is no punishment on personal things like
drinking. These things which make Islamic Law, the troubling aspects of Islamic
Law, were later developed into later interpretations of Islam. Which means that
Muslims can, today, look at those things and say, “Well, the core of our
religion is here to stay with us. It's our faith, and we will be loyal to it.
But we can change how it was interpreted, because it was interpreted according
to the time and milieu in the Middle Ages. Now we are living in a different
world with different values and different political systems.” That
interpretation is quite possible and feasible.
Now if
I were the only person thinking that way, we would be in trouble. But that’s
not the case at all. Actually, from the 19th century on, there’s a whole
revisionist, reformist – whatever you call it – tradition, a trend in Islamic
thinking. And these were intellectuals or statesmen of the 19th century, and
later, 20th century, which looked at Europe basically and saw that Europe has
many things to admire, like science and technology. But not just that; also
democracy, parliament, the idea of representation, the idea of equal
citizenship. These Muslim thinkers and intellectuals and statesmen of the 19th
century looked at Europe, saw these things. They said, “Why don’t we have these
things?” And they looked back at Islamic tradition, they saw that there are
problematic aspects, but they're not the core of the religion, so maybe they
can be re-understood, and the Koran can be reread in the modern world.
That
trend is generally called Islamic modernism, and it was advanced by
intellectuals and statesmen, not just as an intellectual idea though, but also
as a political program. And that’s why actually in the 19th century the Ottoman
Empire, which then covered the whole Middle East, made very important reforms –
reforms like giving Christians and Jews an equal citizenship status, accepting
a constitution, accepting a representative parliament, advancing the idea of
freedom of religion. And that’s why the Ottoman Empire in its last decades
turned into a proto-democracy, a constitutional monarchy, and freedom was a
very important political value at the time.
Similarly,
in the Arab world, there was what the great Arab historian Albert Hourani
defines as the Liberal Age. He has a book, “Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age,”
and the Liberal Age, he defines as 19th century and early 20th century. Quite
notably, this was the dominant trend in the early 20th century among Islamic
thinkers and statesmen and theologians. But there is a very curious pattern in
the rest of the 20th century, because we see a sharp decline in this Islamic
modernist line. And in place of that, what happens is that Islamism grows as an
ideology which is authoritarian, which is quite strident, which is quite
anti-Western, and which wants to shape society based on a utopian vision.
So
Islamism is the problematic idea that really created a lot of problems in the
20th century Islamic world. And even the very extreme forms of Islamism led to
terrorism in the name of Islam – which is actually a practice that I think is
against Islam, but some, obviously, extremists did not think that way. But
there is a curious question: If Islamic modernism was so popular in the 19th
and early 20th centuries, why did Islamism become so popular in the rest of the
20th century? And this is a question, I think, which needs to be discussed
carefully. And in my book, I went into that question as well. And actually you
don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand that. You just look at the
political history of the 20th century, and you see things have changed a lot.
The context has changed.
In the
19th century, when Muslims were looking at Europe as an example, they were
independent; they were more self-confident. In the early 20th century, with the
fall of the Ottoman Empire, the whole Middle East was colonized. And when you
have colonization what do you have? You have anti-colonization. So Europe is
not just an example now to emulate; it’s an enemy to fight and to resist. So
there’s a very sharp decline in liberal ideas in the Muslim world, and what you
see is more of a defensive, rigid, reactionary strain, which led to Arab
socialism, Arab nationalism and ultimately to the Islamist ideology. And when
the colonial period ended, what you had in place of that was, generally,
secular dictators, which say they’re a country, but did not bring democracy to
the country, and established their own dictatorship. And I think the West, at
least some powers in the West, particularly the United States, made the mistake
of supporting those secular dictators, thinking that they were more helpful for
their interests. But the fact that those dictators suppressed democracy in
their country and suppressed Islamic groups in their country actually made the
Islamists much more strident.
So in
the 20th century, you had this vicious cycle in the Arab world where you have a
dictatorship suppressing its own people including the Islamic-pious, and they’re
reacting in reactionary ways. There was one country, though, which was able to
escape or stay away from that vicious cycle. And that’s the country where I
come from; that’s Turkey. Turkey has never been colonized, so it remained as an
independent nation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. That’s one thing to
remember. They did not share the same anti-colonial hype that you can find in
some other countries in the region. Secondly, and most importantly, Turkey
became a democracy earlier than any of the countries we are talking about. In
1950, Turkey had the first free and fair elections, which ended the more
autocratic secular regime, which was the beginning of Turkey. And the pious
Muslims in Turkey saw that they can change the political system by voting. And
they realize that democracy is something that is compatible with Islam,
compatible with their values, and they’ve been supportive of democracy. That’s
an experience that not every other Muslim nation in the Middle East had until
very recently.
Secondly,
in the past two decades, thanks to globalization, thanks to the market economy,
thanks to the rise of a middle-class, we in Turkey see what I define as a
rebirth of Islamic modernism. Now there’s the more urban middle-class pious
Muslims who, again, look at their tradition and see that there are some
problems in the tradition, and they understand that they need to be changed and
questioned and reformed. And they look at Europe, and they see an example,
again, to follow. They see an example, at least, to take some inspiration from.
That’s why the E.U. process, Turkey’s effort to join the E.U., has been
supported inside Turkey by the Islamic-pious, while some secular nations were
against that. Well that process has been a little bit blurred by the fact that
not all Europeans are that welcoming – but that’s another discussion. But the
pro-E.U. sentiment in Turkey in the past decade has become almost an Islamic
cause and supported by the Islamic liberals and the secular liberals as well,
of course.
And
thanks to that, Turkey has been able to reasonably create a success story in
which Islam and the most pious understandings of Islam have become part of the
democratic game, and even contributes to the democratic and economic advance of
the country. And this has been an inspiring example right now for some of the
Islamic movements or some of the countries in the Arab world.
You
must have all seen the Arab Spring, which began in Tunis and in Egypt. And Arab
masses just revolted against their dictators. They were asking for democracy;
they were asking for freedom. And they did not turn out to be the Islamist
boogyman that the dictators were always using to justify their regime. They
said that “we want freedom; we want democracy. We are Muslim believers, but we
want to be living as free people in free societies.” Of course, this is a long
road. Democracy is not an overnight achievement; it’s a process. But this is a
promising era in the Muslim world.
And I
believe that the Islamic modernism which began in the 19th century, but which
had a setback in the 20th century because of the political troubles of the
Muslim world, is having a rebirth. And I think the getaway message from that
would be that Islam, despite some of the skeptics in the West, has the
potential in itself to create its own way to democracy, create its own way to
liberalism, create its own way to freedom. They just should be allowed to work
for that.
Thanks
so much.
Mustafa Akyol on Islam without Extremes. Interviewed by Fareed Zakaria. GPS. CNN, December 15, 2013. Video at the Internet Archive. Akyol interview begins at clip 46:30.
Transcript:
ZAKARIA: Modern Islamists full of contrasts, conflicts
and contradictions. Some of the fateful seem stuck in the 15th century or even
earlier while others are racing into the 21st. One of the sharpest takes on
modern Islam that I’ve read in a long time is a new book by Turkey’s finest
political analyst, Mustafa Akyol. It is called “Islam Without Extremes: A
Muslim Case for Liberty.” It’s a past GPS book of the week. Akyol joined me
recently to discuss the futures of Islam.
Mustafa
Akyol, pleasure to have you on.
MUSTAFA
AKYOL, AUTHOR, “ISLAM WITHOUT EXTREMES”: It’s a pleasure to be on the show,
Fareed, thank you.
ZAKARIA:
Why do you think Islam has such a kind of brutal image? You know, even
well-meaning people, even tolerant people basically believe that at the end of
the day, there’s something in the religion that seems to breed fanaticism or
intolerance or violence? And that if you look at, you know, an event around the
world, a terrorist event, something like that, there is a tendency to assume
that it must be those Muslims out there somewhere, Nigeria, Indonesia. Why do
you think that is?
AKYOL: Well,
that is because honestly, there are fanatic intolerant Muslims who, of, course
have been making the news because they’re doing or saying horrible things, but
my argument as a fellow Muslim is that, well, Christianity had such expressions
in the past. There was a time Catholicism was not very liberal, the Middle
Ages, the inquisition. But it has changed. But Islam can change as well.
ZAKARIA:
Now, you grew up in Turkey, which is a secular country, you grew up as a
believing Muslim, but liberal. What was
your experience of growing up with regard to this issue? Or did you watch
extremism grow?
AKYOL: While
I was growing up I saw signs of authoritarianism in the name of Islam, which
disturbed me, but on the other hand I loved Islam as a faith. In my book,
actually, I explain how I found the book in my grandfather’s library at the age
of nine, which had beautiful quotes from the Koran, then a quote not from the
Koran, but a medieval Islamic text, which said if your children do not start to
pray at the age of ten, then beat them up. Well, at the age of nine, when I
read that, I got a little worried. And I had a question in my mind. I said
like, would it be a good thing if I prayed because I wanted to away the slap in
my face? Would it be much better?
ZAKARIA:
If the only reason you’re praying is to avoid getting . . .
AKYOL: Avoid.
Yeah. And would it be much better if I prayed genuinely to worship God? And I
think that’s the question that is very relevant for some Muslim societies
today.
Z
AKARIA: But
you found that a lot of the things that youths, that people think of as part of
Islam are actually not in the book.
AKYOL: Not
in the Koran. I mean there’s no stoning in the Koran. The idea that you should
execute someone for apostatizing from Islam doesn't exist in the Koran. The
idea that women are not smart enough to advise men, that’s not in the Koran. A
lot of troubling issues that we find in the Muslim world today are actually –
do not come from the core of the religion, which is scripture. They come from
historical interpretations, and they sometimes reflect just medieval, Middle
Eastern culture rather than the religion itself, which makes it easier to make
a case for reform of these.
ZAKARIA:
If you look at the issue that most people think of as the central part of
Islam, the women in black veils, head to toe, the line in the Koran as I
understand it, simply says women should dress modestly, as should men.
AKYOL:
Exactly.
ZAKARIA:
From that has been interpreted . . .
AKYOL:
Exactly. I mean when you look at the Koran, there is – yes, women should stress
modestly and some medieval scholars describe this modesty in the tenth century
that nothing should be visible other than their eyes. And when we freeze Islam
in these medieval norms we are actually making – creating this big gap between
the modern world and evolving modern world and some traditions. And I think
that also harms Islam because it makes people to choose between their fate and
a more open liberal attitude.
ZAKARIA:
You noticed something very interesting when you went to Mecca, you know, where
you did the hajj actually, what's called the Umrah, the offseason hajj.
AKYOL:
Yeah.
ZAKARIA:
And you noticed something about the difference between being in the heart of
Mecca, following the rules that have been in place since the seventh century,
and Saudi Arabia today.
AKYOL: Very
interesting. Indeed, when I went to the Kaaba, I did my prayers and the
rituals. What I noticed was that around the Kaaba, there is no segregation. Men
and women are together. There is no physical barrier between a man and a woman
in the very holy shrine of Islam.
ZAKARIA:
And the Kaaba is the holiest shrine.
AKYOL: The
holiest shrine in the city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, the birth place of Islam.
But the interesting thing is, and you leave the Kaaba and you go to Burger King
or Starbucks, which is next to the shrine, you have to be separated. Men and
women go two different ways because the Saudi Kingdom physically separates men
and women in every public space. Thinking that that’s the pious thing to do. But
if there was – except in Kaaba. So, if
you want to talk to a lady in Saudi Arabia freely, that is the only way that
you can – the only way you can do this, the only place you can do this, is the
Kaaba.
ZAKARIA:
What do you say to people who said fine, Christianity was intolerant 500 years
ago. Right now what we’re dealing with is that Islam is going through a very
intolerant phase and it is, therefore, the problem?
AKYOL: Well,
I would agree with that, unfortunately. Not about all Islam. But we have
Islamic groups, movements that are really intolerant and sometimes even
violent. My argument – I’m not someone who says there’s no problem with the
Muslim world. I accept that there are
big problems especially from a liberal point of view, but I think they can be
changed and reformed as Catholicism has changed immensely over the centuries as
other religions have changed.
ZAKARIA:
And how do you do that reform? Is there something that the West can do, that
America can do or is this essentially an internal debate within Islam?
AKYOL: This
is essentially an internal debate within Islam. But in my book I argued that
the West can help indirectly, first by supporting principles of democracy, and
not supporting militant or autocratic regimes in the Middle East like it
happened for a long time. Secondly, support the market economy because one
thing that transformed minds is the economy. In Turkey, for example, one of the
reasons that Turkey is a successful country, democracy, with some flaws, you
know, that we are discussing these days, is that Turkey has a market economy,
which raised the middle class, which made people more rational, more pragmatic
about their attitude to world and also in religious matters as well. In the
Arab world you have sometimes – you have oil money, which, really, is a curse
as you also wonderfully explained in your book, so we need to have education
and West can help in that regard. We need to have cultural exchanges. These are
all very helpful, but violent confrontations do not help. Like occupying a
country to liberate it, it does not really that help that much.
ZAKARIA:
Mustafa, pleasure to have you on.
AKYOL: Pleasure
to be on the show. Thank you, Fareed.
Mustafa Akyol: Islam Without Extremes. Video. warwicklibertarians, November 23, 2011. YouTube.
Mustafa Akyol: The Commercial Heritage and Contribution of Islam. Video. misesmedia, March 12, 2011. YouTube.
Does Islam Need Reformation? Debate at SOAS: Mustafa Akyol vs. Abdullah al Andalusi. Video. Muslim Debate Initiative, April 3, 2012. YouTube.
Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism? By Robert Nozick. Libertarianism.org. Originally published in Cato Policy Report, January/February 1998.
“Remember Who the Real Enemy Is.” By Peter Blair. The American Interest, December 13, 2013.
Kerry’s Peace Framework Versus Reality. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, December 12, 2013.
