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Study of Islam a taboo?

The Return Of Rothkoid

08:38 / 12.11.01

Found this in The Guardian on the weekend. Seems to be the usual snipey acadamic stuff you'd expect - the author savages Said a bit - but what do people think of the idea behind it? Is the sort of academic investigation of religion - proposed here as necessary to understanding - tenable? What's the deal? Who's pro-/anti- Said, and why? I've never read Orientalism, and know very little of this area, so any opinion would be useful.

08:48 / 12.11.01

Ed Said can suck my seed...

Seriously, though, I read that article too, and it's quite disturbing - scholars being told they can't publish the results of their researches because they'd be unacceptable? Sounds a bit familiar, doesn't it?

I have noticed a tendency to shy away from criticising Islam on the part of liberals - probably 'cause of the 'plain physical fear' mentioned in the article more than anything else...But I think it also has to do with it having some kind of fashionable 'outsider' status as a religion - supporting it's the intellectual equivalent of wearing one of those Che Guevara t-shirts (except skatepunks in Che t's know more about what they're supporting).

In the end, though, I'm sticking to my original line on all this - they're not a noble, peaceful religion, they're the Xtians in funny hats, and we should fuck them up the same way we fucked up the Xtians...

Regrettable Juvenilia

08:52 / 12.11.01

quote:Originally posted by velvetvandal:
they're not a noble, peaceful religion, they're the Xtians in funny hats, and we should fuck them up the same way we fucked up the Xtians...

Care to explain what on earth you mean by "fuck up" here?

The resistable rise of Reidcourchie

08:52 / 12.11.01

I've been thinking about this a lot recently and was considering starting a thread along these lines. I've never felt comfortable criticising someone elses culture, though at the same time I've never minded having mine criticised.

More on this later when I've thought up some relative questions.

Velvet could you substantiate your comments because that's a prety sweeping generalisation.

Regrettable Juvenilia

08:52 / 12.11.01

There's nothing wrong with criticising someone else's culture if you have taken the time and trouble to educate and inform yourself substantially about that culture. velvetvandal may be just being flippant, and may in fact know a great deal about Islam, but to dismiss Muslims worldwide as "Christians in funny hats" suggests otherwise.

It should also be pointed out that regardless of the motives velvetvandal's "liberals" (whatever that means) have for not criticising Islam, 'not criticising' and 'supporting' are two very different things. You don't have to be a mullah to hold the opinion that ill-considered mass generalisations are not where it's at.

[ 12-11-2001: Message edited by: Flyboy ]

08:52 / 12.11.01

'fuck up' = generally undermine their religion thru a campaign of blasphemy, heresy, iconoclasm, etc, discordian-style, in order to force people to actually think about their religion rather than blindly (and blandly) accepting what they get told by the clergy, and, eventually, to alter the religion and defuse its more fundamentalist tendencies.

Obviously I could have made that a bit more obvious in the earlier post, but then I'd have lost the chance to look nihilistic and macho

, wouldn't I?

Regrettable Juvenilia

08:52 / 12.11.01

Well. I suppose congratulations are in order for having so successfully eliminated Christianity's more fundamentalist elements worldwide, through your subversive undermining campaign. Now good luck with working on all those ignorant Muslims, not of whom on the planet has ever thought independently for themselves, the sheep-like fools. That'll all change though once they've been told how to think more like you... oh, hang on.

The resistable rise of Reidcourchie

08:52 / 12.11.01

Originally posted by Flyboy
"There's nothing wrong with criticising someone else's culture if you have taken the time and trouble to educate and inform yourself substantially about that culture."

Really? You sure? From what perspective can you criticise it if the culture is alien to you? Or are we assuming that a critic would have some kind of either purely subjective or completely definitive world view. All you have is your norms against theirs. I don't think we have the right to judge.

08:52 / 12.11.01

Yes, if everyone thinks like me we'll be...

* shudder*

I've got no problem with people disagreeing with me at all (except if they like Andrew WK, but that's a different story). And I'd argue that Christianity's more fundamentalist elements have been, if not removed, reduced in number and severity - okay, we still have Falwell and Roberts, but at least none of us have to worry about getting burned on stakes...

And I don't think they're all 'ignorant sheep'. Just people who could do with widening their perspectives.

As could we all, come to think of it...

08:52 / 12.11.01

But that would hold true for any sort of criticism, wouldn't it? No commentator can ever be anything but subjective. I don't think that that invalidates attempts to analyse something or indeed anything in a critical fashion (not forgetting that criticism isn't automatically negative).

Surely something which is valid would stand up to criticism; and therefore something which simply denies that it can be criticised or be subject to criticism - on whatever grounds - is actually making more of a statement about its vulnerability to adverse criticism.

[ 12-11-2001: Message edited by: Kit-Cat Club ]

The Return Of Rothkoid

08:52 / 12.11.01

I've always found it difficult to make some kind of judgement call on a matter of faith - surely it's because certain aspects of religions are designed to be taken on faith that is the problem - if one's not of that faith, are they likely to give proper weighting to the tenets of it? Or, are people who are of that faith likely to give it too much? I guess that you could solve it by viewing religious texts as texts only, and criticising them as one would literature or any other text - but isn't that how Salman Rushdie got in trouble? It's problematic, and I can see that compromise would be pretty difficult.

More generally, how does religious criticism work? I mean, in terms of sidestepping problems like this. The article mentions years of Christian criticism and study; how long was it until this was accepted, or allowed, or...? I'm not exactly au fait with the process of taking on churches or other organised religions, and don't know how it all got started. I expect the differences between critics, concerned members and heretics haven't been particularly well-defined at times...

Regrettable Juvenilia

10:01 / 12.11.01

Redcap - "judge" is a very loaded word and if you mean "weigh in the balance and pass a conclusive moral judgment on", then I'd pretty much agree with you - except that rather than talking about the 'right' to do so, I'd say it's more accurate to say that we just don't have the ability to judge an alien culture with any competence... I should probably have also stressed quite what a rigorous and thorough (and quite beyond me at this point) a process I meant by "educate and inform yourself substantially".

And as Kit-Cat says, "criticism" isn't automatically negative - although it's a word used so much as if it were that perhaps I ought to have said "analyse", or "offer an opinion on". After all, the alternative to taking the risk of forming opinions on other cultures is to act as if yours is the only one that exists - which is pretty much the problem with people's reactions to September 11th, in that this is *exactly* what many people in the USA and UK had been doing, with the result that when reality intruded upon the fantasy of we-are-all-there-is, a huge cry of "why?" went up, and lots of people accepted simple, erroneous answers ("they're uncivilised", "they envy us", "they hate democracy", etc).

The resistable rise of Reidcourchie

10:02 / 12.11.01

Originally posted by velvetvandal
"And I'd argue that Christianity's more fundamentalist elements have been, if not removed, reduced in number and severity - okay, we still have Falwell and Roberts, but at least none of us have to worry about getting burned on stakes..."

Originally posted by Rothkoid
"The article mentions years of Christian criticism and study; how long was it until this was accepted, or allowed, or...?"

Yeah but that's the thing, to a certain extent it was all internal. It was all people from their own religion or at very least culture criticising their own religion/culutre. What I'm worried about is people from one culture telling the other that they are wrong.

10:21 / 12.11.01

But, you see, 'you're wrong' not what I would call a true critical opinion (and anyone who disagrees with me is automatically wrong, of course...)

I'd say that criticism takes a form something like 'well, you think this about this, but perhaps I could suggest that in the light of this and this, you might consider this option, because.... etc etc'. It's a process of analysis (and as such is pretty much never-ending), not of judgement.

And I can't see any reason why this process shouldn't take place across cultural boundaries - in fact I can see every reason why it *should*.

Having said all of which, I am now going to criticise my own opinion by pointing out to myself that this is a rather utopian idea of critical dialogue, which can really only work where freedom of speech, of the press and of information is established... and is therefore perhaps not especially relevant at the moment.

10:32 / 12.11.01

Redcap - I've mulled that one over more than a few times myself.

My final way of looking at it was this - I'm going to express my viewpoint anyway; I'm going to act as I'm going to act anyway, regardless of whether other people think I have the right. As far as I'm concerned it would be worse to sit back, do and say nothing, and wait for this kind of criticism to emerge within Islam than it would be to act and risk looking like a goddamn fool...

In the end my rationalisation is that all I'm doing is introducing chaotic information into their idea-complex and letting them think it over, which is morally more justifiable than actually attempting to impose my own views on them.

Yeah, sez me...

13:14 / 12.11.01

I admit I've not read Said...but I have read Fatima Mernissi.

Speaking for myself, I find Muslims critiquing Islam more interesting than Xtians critiquing Islam.

[ 12-11-2001: Message edited by: Ierne ]

The resistable rise of Reidcourchie

13:20 / 12.11.01

Originally posted by the Kit-Cat Club
"Having said all of which, I am now going to criticise my own opinion by pointing out to myself that this is a rather utopian idea of critical dialogue, which can really only work where freedom of speech, of the press and of information is established... and is therefore perhaps not especially relevant at the moment."

Well that's the problem isn't it, we can't sort out our own backyard and already we're looking in our neighbour's.

13:38 / 12.11.01

Well, that's not quite what I meant. I wasn't thinking about backyards and whose is cleaner, but about the tendency towards demagoguery on all sides during wars, which has the effect of inhibiting cross-cultural dialogue and which I deplore.

On the other hand, the 9/11 coverage has certainly increased the attention given to Muslim points of view in the British media (don't know about anywhere else, how blinkered of me), and many of those have been critical of some aspects of Al Qaeda and other fundamentalist groups. I don't see the clash as being between Christians and Muslims here, it's more between secular and non-secular societies.

14:35 / 12.11.01

quote:Originally posted by velvetvandal:
they're the Xtians in funny hats, and we should fuck them up the same way we fucked up the Xtians...

Shit. I thought you were talking about space creatures for a second there. Guess I can stop looking out for the tripods.

15:13 / 12.11.01

Muslim's are Xtian's in funny hats? I thought the main difference between Islam and Xtianity (never used this reduction before - it somehow makes Christianity look cooler than it should) was that Islam is, fundamentally, still a religion. With rituals, laws, strictures and the like that its followers still adhere to. Xtianity, on the other hand, is something like a collective conscious phantasm thing (eloquent or what?), that fades further into obscurity with every passing generation. Sure, that's not to deny that there are still actual living, breathing Xtians out there, but lets face it, the Western church is dying and lip service is the closest most "Xtians" get to a religious service.

My point being: we are a secular society. Religion is a minority thing, you know, its cool if you want to get into it, you krazy kats, just don't expect us to alter our entire liberal-humanist, thoroughly modern, post- Enlightenment society for you, just because you believe some guy got nailed to a tree, or went up a mountain and met an angel, or whatever.

Which leads us to: they are not a secular society. Islam places religion at the centre of everyday existence. Religion and society are thus inseparable concepts, and that is an unutterably alien paradigm for us westerners (at least those of us born sometime after 1750). Which is why this problem is not going to go away for a very long time, i reckon.

And should the study of Islam be a taboo? Nah. Just ask Salman Rushdie.

16:06 / 12.11.01

Xtianity, on the other hand, is something like a collective conscious phantasm thing (eloquent or what?), that fades further into obscurity with every passing generation. Sure, that's not to deny that there are still actual living, breathing Xtians out there, but lets face it, the Western church is dying and lip service is the closest most "Xtians" get to a religious service.

I'm not so convinced of that as you are, at least not here in the States. It's more a case of "lip service" being paid to the Separation of Church and State, while no-one really pays attention to it. There are many Xtians in North America who can and do reconcile living in a "liberal-humanist, thoroughly modern, post- Enlightenment society" with a deep and unswerving faith. (I'm not sure how they do it, but they do.) Not least of all the elites who actually make the decisions...

Then of course, there's Latin America, which is also extremely Xtian in outlook. And we've not even touched on Judaism in the Americas...Monotheism is alive and kicking.

07:23 / 13.11.01

Althusser - that's kind of what I meant. The Dead Bloke On A Stick brigade have been disarmed in the west over the past few centuries - to the extent that even Archbishops will admit that their religion's been 'vanquished'. Poor Archbishops - they might not be able to live in their palaces if things keep on like this...

But remember, before all that happened, the church was responsible for such hits as the Inquisition, the Witch Hunts, and the Albigensian Crusade: periods during which, in the name of religion, heretics, women, and sexual deviants, among others, were hunted down and killed in horrific, barbaric ways.

Which sounds kind of familiar.

Lerne, I agree with you - I do find it more interesting (and encouraging) to see Submissives critiquing Submission than Xtians - but since I'm neither a Submissive nor a Jesus Freak, I reserve the right to crticise both, preferably in the most sarky, immature and annoying way possible...Like literally translating the name of their religion into my own idiom, for e.g.

07:32 / 13.11.01

Just so long as you don't get peeved when people criticise you for being immature and annoying...

07:44 / 13.11.01

Criticise me for being immature and annoying, will you?

Right, that's it, I'm not speaking to you anymore...I'm gonna hold my breath 'til I turn blue, in fact...So nahhh!

The resistable rise of Reidcourchie

12:33 / 13.11.01

Originally posted by velvetvandal

"But remember, before all that happened, the church was responsible for such hits as the Inquisition, the Witch Hunts, and the Albigensian Crusade: periods during which, in the name of religion, heretics, women, and sexual deviants, among others, were hunted down and killed in horrific, barbaric ways.

Which sounds kind of familiar."

Does it? What are you getting at? Please explain?

12:54 / 14.11.01

I was thinking about this last night, and it struck me that the root cause of the problem is commerce (surprise...).

Because: western secular culture and islamic religious culture are separate, and would both be quite inward-looking if it wasn't for commerce. But big international business and commerce allows anglophone western secular culture to remain essentially inward-looking while still spreading itself into all the nooks and crannies of the rest of the world.

In this way, western secular culture can remain fairly oblivious to the 'Other', while islamic religious culture gets the western 'Other' rammed down its throat willy-nilly.

Both societies have perceptions about the other, obviously, which may or may not be accurate or appropriate; but it's not surprising that islamic religious culture reacts so badly to invasive western culture.

13:13 / 14.11.01

I dunno...It just looks like a straightforward memewar to me.

Redcap - I was drawing a comparison between the woman/heretic/deviant-slaying Inquisitors and the woman/heretic/deviant-slaying Taliban types.

But I'm sure you knew that, and were just being equally rhetorical.