Muslims Living in the West: On the Nature of Bad Argument under the Shari'a
Reading the latest (characteristically eloquent, thought provoking and insightful) piece by Andrew March, friend of the blog, at Yale, on Tariq Ramadan got me thinking more deeply about the question of hostility, or at least discomfort, of so many conservative Muslims, whether Muslim Brotherhood types or Salafi types, toward living in the West. (I'm not addressing his article, just pointing it out as the catalyst of my own thoughts. If I were addressing the piece, I'd say Andrew better be careful, he's come close in it to the Dark Side Realism by saying, as he does, that even though Tariq Ramadan's arguments are not necessarily intellectually powerful they are worthy of attention because of his pedigree. That's dangerously close to who cares what the logical force of the argument is, all I care about is whether or not people are buying it. If we get Luke Skywalker to give in to the Dark Side their side is going to be in trouble.)
As is obvious from the blog, I like to ask why some arguments succeed and others fail on questions like this, and I will admit I don't usually pay much attention to the face of the argument. Sometimes, that is because there are simply too many equally valid ways to read the text and so there has to be something else at work. Other times, it is because, on the face of it, the argument is pretty bad. Here I think we're working with bad argument. Let's start with the face of the central question I want to write about--why more conservative and traditional Muslims are apprehensive about living in the West. The reason given begins with the classical ideal of a binary House of Islam/House of Unbelief, and how can a Muslim live in the House of Unbelief and still be a good Muslim. Most Muslims probably don't think about this, but more doctrinaire ones obviously do.
So some just reject the notion of living in the West outright, and decide the West is so sinful you can't live there, or if you do you have to build this huge wall to block out the evil satanic influences, and I think they are very few in the US, more in Europe (mainly because the wall is being put up on the other side, by the white people, too). Other Muslims take a different approach--that to live in the West is an opportunity to actually spread the Word, like Mormons on a mission or something. If you take this idea seriously, it's pretty disturbing, it's a rejection of liberal coexistence except as a means to an end of a True Islamic State, but I don't pay it much heed because I don't think of it as anything but an excuse. It seems to work, (as Andrew notes it's a challenge almost to the stricter Salafis--we don't need your war, we're the true soldiers, going into the heart of decadence and bringing about Islam through missionarism) but the number of people who say that divided into the number who spend five minutes doing anything like missionary work yields a rather small fraction. I know, I should take people more seriously, can't help it, I look at the MSA's in which I have been involved, nobody's doing missionary work. The only people who do, the tablighis, spent most of their time I knew them coming to my dorm trying to make sure I was as observant (and Sunni) as they wanted me to be (my fault, I was 18, I engaged them in argument). This mainly involved their wanting me to pray with my hands across my belly and calling me to wake me up at 4 AM to pray. So how they could do all that and convert non-Muslims is beyond me.
Moreover, to get to the substance of the idea, the Qaradawis of the world it seems to me have this basic problem I like to call the "Zarqawi problem" that they never really address. So, and I say this as an Iraqi, this Zarqawi character waltzes into our damn country, meaning Iraq, and starts up all sorts of terrorist activities and killings and God knows what, and says, to a rather approving audience of Arabs outside Iraq, that America invaded Iraq to steal its oil and to create an Israeli ally, and so we resist. Flip on Al Jazeera, and you get this Israeli ally nonsense too, followed by more exhortations to resist through bombing mosques and religious processions or whatever. So as an Iraqi you're scratching your head, thinking, so the fat Jordanian and the loud Palestinian journalist in Qatar don't want an Israeli ally in the Middle East, huh? Well here's a God damn solution--Jordanian, you go bomb your own country, it's got relations with Israel already, Palestinian in Qatar you choose--bomb Mahmoud Abbas or some shopping mall in Qatar for its relations with Israel and its selling oil to the Americans, but either way, would you leave us and our civilians and our shopping malls out of your sick sick delusions and designs please? We'd prefer to avoid anyone being bombed thanks very much." But for some reason this never arises, resist the West and prevent it from doing things these other people already do. It makes no sense to me.
And I think the same thing can be said of the intellectual poverty of Qaradawi's position about being able to live in the West because Muslims can then go about converting it. There is no quarter in Qaradawi's theory for the notion that non Muslim laws in criminal law or family law or public law of any kind are inferior, or even on parity--we are better, the theory runs, so let's go to the belly of the beast and change them to realize that. Peacefully, yes, but change it. With Qaradawi it is in your face--not war with the West, but missions to it, so that it will understand the superiority of our system and adopt it as its own. That's the only reason to live in such sin, to change it into virtue.
Except again, if the idea is our rules, the Islamic rules of the shari'a, are so wonderful, why aren't we, meaning the Muslim nations, paying much attention to them? What the hell kind of solution is it when you're not following your own rules to go off and try to get other people to follow them? Who chops hands off of thieves? Not Qatar. Not Egypt. So why is the Egyptian from Qatar saying a reason to go to the West is to teach the infidel about the glories of Islam and the beauty of the shari'a, why isn't the Egyptian in Qatar saying that's a reason to stay in the East, where making the shari'a actual law is more within the realm of possibility? It doesn't work to me. It can't be that living with non Muslims is problematic because then you have to be loyal to nonMuslim law when Muslims are already loyal to their national civil codes, which are not shari'a. I think this is all just bad reasoning, I can't see it working.
But the ambivalence and the distaste among more traditional Muslims is very real, if it wasn't they wouldn't raise this spreading the word theory so much even as they ignore it. But if it isn't really about making America an Islamic state, what is it about?
Here I think you have to go to the central reason that they are so concerned about the US. It's not about making it into an Islamic state so that shari'a can be realized, half of them don't even know shari'a It's about this notion that the US is hostile to Islamic interests. And when you hear the reasons (steal our oil, change our regimes, force on us allies we don't want), it's all very much in the anti-colonial vein. America is the enemy of Islam is the popular view, and so you don't support the enemy. Yeah classical doctrines of Houses of Islam and Unbelief are convenient to that and might help perpetuate it. Doctrine can matter, though doctrine has its limits too. They might believe in the House of Unbelief and America as its head, and doctrine matters a lot there. But they certainly don't believe in the House of Islam in any real sense. Ask the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt how many black Muslim Kenyans they would want to let in this year. Ask them if they should get the same rights of citizenship as Egyptians. Then help me understand what the House of Islam is, other than this rhetorical brotherhood that is more mental construction than political reality.
So there is no House of Islam, and there isn't much of a sense in spreading the word about a legal system that isn't even being followed in the Muslim world anyway. Add those two together, and you are left with classical doctrine being bad argument if accepted in toto (as opposed to convenient pieces that as noted do help reinforce ideas). That's when it's time to look for something else, in this case resisting the colonial occupier.
HAH
As is obvious from the blog, I like to ask why some arguments succeed and others fail on questions like this, and I will admit I don't usually pay much attention to the face of the argument. Sometimes, that is because there are simply too many equally valid ways to read the text and so there has to be something else at work. Other times, it is because, on the face of it, the argument is pretty bad. Here I think we're working with bad argument. Let's start with the face of the central question I want to write about--why more conservative and traditional Muslims are apprehensive about living in the West. The reason given begins with the classical ideal of a binary House of Islam/House of Unbelief, and how can a Muslim live in the House of Unbelief and still be a good Muslim. Most Muslims probably don't think about this, but more doctrinaire ones obviously do.
So some just reject the notion of living in the West outright, and decide the West is so sinful you can't live there, or if you do you have to build this huge wall to block out the evil satanic influences, and I think they are very few in the US, more in Europe (mainly because the wall is being put up on the other side, by the white people, too). Other Muslims take a different approach--that to live in the West is an opportunity to actually spread the Word, like Mormons on a mission or something. If you take this idea seriously, it's pretty disturbing, it's a rejection of liberal coexistence except as a means to an end of a True Islamic State, but I don't pay it much heed because I don't think of it as anything but an excuse. It seems to work, (as Andrew notes it's a challenge almost to the stricter Salafis--we don't need your war, we're the true soldiers, going into the heart of decadence and bringing about Islam through missionarism) but the number of people who say that divided into the number who spend five minutes doing anything like missionary work yields a rather small fraction. I know, I should take people more seriously, can't help it, I look at the MSA's in which I have been involved, nobody's doing missionary work. The only people who do, the tablighis, spent most of their time I knew them coming to my dorm trying to make sure I was as observant (and Sunni) as they wanted me to be (my fault, I was 18, I engaged them in argument). This mainly involved their wanting me to pray with my hands across my belly and calling me to wake me up at 4 AM to pray. So how they could do all that and convert non-Muslims is beyond me.
Moreover, to get to the substance of the idea, the Qaradawis of the world it seems to me have this basic problem I like to call the "Zarqawi problem" that they never really address. So, and I say this as an Iraqi, this Zarqawi character waltzes into our damn country, meaning Iraq, and starts up all sorts of terrorist activities and killings and God knows what, and says, to a rather approving audience of Arabs outside Iraq, that America invaded Iraq to steal its oil and to create an Israeli ally, and so we resist. Flip on Al Jazeera, and you get this Israeli ally nonsense too, followed by more exhortations to resist through bombing mosques and religious processions or whatever. So as an Iraqi you're scratching your head, thinking, so the fat Jordanian and the loud Palestinian journalist in Qatar don't want an Israeli ally in the Middle East, huh? Well here's a God damn solution--Jordanian, you go bomb your own country, it's got relations with Israel already, Palestinian in Qatar you choose--bomb Mahmoud Abbas or some shopping mall in Qatar for its relations with Israel and its selling oil to the Americans, but either way, would you leave us and our civilians and our shopping malls out of your sick sick delusions and designs please? We'd prefer to avoid anyone being bombed thanks very much." But for some reason this never arises, resist the West and prevent it from doing things these other people already do. It makes no sense to me.
And I think the same thing can be said of the intellectual poverty of Qaradawi's position about being able to live in the West because Muslims can then go about converting it. There is no quarter in Qaradawi's theory for the notion that non Muslim laws in criminal law or family law or public law of any kind are inferior, or even on parity--we are better, the theory runs, so let's go to the belly of the beast and change them to realize that. Peacefully, yes, but change it. With Qaradawi it is in your face--not war with the West, but missions to it, so that it will understand the superiority of our system and adopt it as its own. That's the only reason to live in such sin, to change it into virtue.
Except again, if the idea is our rules, the Islamic rules of the shari'a, are so wonderful, why aren't we, meaning the Muslim nations, paying much attention to them? What the hell kind of solution is it when you're not following your own rules to go off and try to get other people to follow them? Who chops hands off of thieves? Not Qatar. Not Egypt. So why is the Egyptian from Qatar saying a reason to go to the West is to teach the infidel about the glories of Islam and the beauty of the shari'a, why isn't the Egyptian in Qatar saying that's a reason to stay in the East, where making the shari'a actual law is more within the realm of possibility? It doesn't work to me. It can't be that living with non Muslims is problematic because then you have to be loyal to nonMuslim law when Muslims are already loyal to their national civil codes, which are not shari'a. I think this is all just bad reasoning, I can't see it working.
But the ambivalence and the distaste among more traditional Muslims is very real, if it wasn't they wouldn't raise this spreading the word theory so much even as they ignore it. But if it isn't really about making America an Islamic state, what is it about?
Here I think you have to go to the central reason that they are so concerned about the US. It's not about making it into an Islamic state so that shari'a can be realized, half of them don't even know shari'a It's about this notion that the US is hostile to Islamic interests. And when you hear the reasons (steal our oil, change our regimes, force on us allies we don't want), it's all very much in the anti-colonial vein. America is the enemy of Islam is the popular view, and so you don't support the enemy. Yeah classical doctrines of Houses of Islam and Unbelief are convenient to that and might help perpetuate it. Doctrine can matter, though doctrine has its limits too. They might believe in the House of Unbelief and America as its head, and doctrine matters a lot there. But they certainly don't believe in the House of Islam in any real sense. Ask the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt how many black Muslim Kenyans they would want to let in this year. Ask them if they should get the same rights of citizenship as Egyptians. Then help me understand what the House of Islam is, other than this rhetorical brotherhood that is more mental construction than political reality.
So there is no House of Islam, and there isn't much of a sense in spreading the word about a legal system that isn't even being followed in the Muslim world anyway. Add those two together, and you are left with classical doctrine being bad argument if accepted in toto (as opposed to convenient pieces that as noted do help reinforce ideas). That's when it's time to look for something else, in this case resisting the colonial occupier.
HAH
Thanks for the "ink."
I agree with your comments on the da'wa trope. I just want to add that they seem to function in another way: not just as a justification of living here in the first place, but also as a meta-ethical method for theorizing moral obligation to non-Muslims. In brief: if the entire "asl" of the relationship with non-Muslims shifts from harb not to peace but to "da'wa" these leads to all sorts of implications of treating non-Muslims as rational beings in need of rational persuasion through strictly non-coercive argumentation and also a deeper concern for non-Muslim concerns and welfare. I argue that this is a bit like Habermas's idea of communication as revealing of certain transcendental ethical norms.
I argue for all this here:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1264272
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This is quite a good point. It probably explains the lack of interest among some Muslims in da'wa towards Jews, despite ample early Islamic precedent. Stories of Jews converting due to something Imam Ali did are quite common among Shi'a, but really more to extol the virtues of Imam Ali (he could even get Jews to convert!) than as a genuine effort to replicate the example. Virulent anti-Semitism, unwillingness, that is, to "treat non-Muslims (when Jews) as rational beings in need of rational persuasion" or to acknowledge "deeper concern for non-Muslim concerns and welfare" might have something to do with that.
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Praise be to God. I'm grateful to God for putting signs in the Qur'an.
I think surahs 2 through 7 show that dawah is obligatory for the muslim community in a non-muslim land. I also think that gradual conversion is the result of dawah, and that islam is to be established in every place. I also think that it is not ok for us to accept any other religion on a permanently basis (except those of the book, paying jizyah), although other religions may be tolerated while dawah continues.
I think suitable conditions for dawah leads to dawah, and blocking of dawah, i.e, withdrawal of conditions of dawah, leads to jihad.
If I am wrong, I hope you are not misguided by my error. God knows best about all things. I'm grateful to God that He has warned us about judgement day and given us a plan to follow. Praise be to God.
Sebastian Reed
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