Nothing To Get Hung About
Just a short note about a pet peeve: can we stop premising arguments on the notion that there is an objective “real” this or that – a “real” Islam, a “real” Christianity, a “real” American, a “real” woman – whatever. There’s no substantive content whatsoever to the modifier. With respect to Islam in particular, I hear these sorts of arguments all the time, on both sides of any given dispute. “Real” Islam, someone will say, is a religion of war and of conquest, incapable of peaceful coexistence; anyone who tells you otherwise is either a dupe (if he’s not a Muslim) or is lying artfully to try to dupe non-Muslims (if she is). Oh, no, someone else will say; that’s Islam-_ism_, not Islam. “Real” Islam is peaceful; “real” jihad is about internal struggle against sin; and anyone who tells you otherwise is either trying to badmouth Islam (if she’s not a Muslim) or is trying to hijack Islam for an extremist political agenda (if he is).
These are not arguments. They are unfalsifiable statements without any substantive content designed to avoid an argument. They are unseemly and condescending when they come from a random blogger; how much more so when they come from someone as august as the British Prime Minister.
Islam “really” is whatever professed Muslims, in aggregate, do or think they ought to be doing at a given point in time. Or, alternatively, Islam “really” is what Islamic authorities recognized by other Islamic authorities think, in aggregate, Muslims ought to be doing at a given point in time. Given the nature of things, both of these measures are going to give you blobs with a considerable degree of diversity, even contradiction, within them, and the blobs are going to evolve.
I used to get all bothered about “moderates” versus “extremists” because often the moderates on one vector were actually quite extreme on another vector, and also because “moderate” and “extreme” mean very different things depending upon one’s point of reference. (Example: so many white people think of Martin Luther King as the “moderate” voice of the Civil Rights Movement because we would like to pretend that his commitment to nonviolence was about being opposed to violence, about not wanting to take things too far, but that wasn’t the case at all; King’s opposition to violence was about trying to change the world in radical ways, about a certain theory about how the world worked and what a successful radicalism required. He was a hugely radical person – an extremist, even – and in no meaningful sense a moderate.) But the “moderate” versus “extremist” dichotomy looks pretty good to me relative to a dichotomy between “real” and “unreal.”
If you want to argue that a particular individual or group or point of view is unrepresentative – use that word. That’s something that, at least in principle, can be checked. But otherwise, just drop the point.
i agree in general. but i would aver that with religion in particular the idea that there is a real essence is pernicious and fraught. the class woman after all has a clear and distinct prototype, and marginal deviations from type (e.g., androgen insensitive individuals who are XY, but who never underwent the testosterone induced changes to transform them into males). in contrast, the distribution of “islam” and “christianity” as understood by the professed views and realized actions of believers is far more uniform (the variance is higher).
but, as an irreligious atheist it is easy for me to assert as a matter of fact that religion is simply a label for a set of actions and beliefs which occupy a particular “parameter space.” but what about believers? for many believers there is a “real islam” or “real christianity” on high, and human interpretations of that idealized reality are deviations from this Truth. so there needs to be a subtle understanding here of the different frameworks one operates when address believers or unbelievers. when you’re among believers you can speak of a real ideal of what the religion is, because you believe in a god or essence which grounds the reality. among unbelievers you can’t make this assumption, because they think that your presumption of reality of grounding is false.
on a marginally related note, i believe that liberal secular americans given “moderate muslims” more license to gush about how teh awesome their religion is in a way that they’d find distasteful among evangelicals (and is quite common among evangelicals). so the discourse of “real islam” is common in part because muslims don’t always face the skepticism and dismissal as to the truth claims of their religion that they might otherwise face.
— razib · Aug 4, 03:12 AM · #
This commandment makes me want to use “real” more than ever. Besides it’s a good qualifier to distinguish that which is authentic from that which is not — to call out violators of the law of identity.
— Mike Farmer · Aug 4, 03:14 AM · #
Say ‘no’ to the No Real Scotsman fallacy.
— SB7 · Aug 4, 03:38 AM · #
@razib Gushing is one thing; literal proselytization is quite another. Thus the gap.
— Jesse F · Aug 4, 04:30 AM · #
“Gushing is one thing; literal proselytization is quite another.”
i wasn’t comparing apples to oranges, but oranges to oranges. don’t rewrite what i said to prove your case. the evangelical protestant extolling of the awesomeness of their religion is viewed as low-class by secular society. but when muslims gush in an analogous way they’re treated with indulgence or deference. it’s probably similar to the way that it’s acceptable for black celebrities to talk about their religious faith without being seen as being inbred hillbillies, because it’s part of their “culture,” while whites who do the same are seen as kind of weird.
— razib · Aug 4, 04:34 AM · #
But can you convince the Muslims that there is no real Islam?
As Razib pointed out years ago, the huge increase in the number of Muslims who make the pilgrimage to Mecca has spread Meccan rigor all over the world. Pilgrims tend to come home from Mecca and lord it over their less affluent co-religionists who haven’t made the pilgrimage: “Well, when I was in Mecca, I saw that the real Muslim way to do things is such and such.” Thus, Indonesia is more Islamic today than in, say, Lolo Soetoro’s more easy-going days.
— Steve Sailer · Aug 4, 05:08 AM · #
interesting post. I have been pondering this topic,so thanks for writing. I’ll probably be coming back to your blog. …
— designer clothes · Aug 4, 08:09 AM · #
Noah, I suspect some Cardinal perhaps tried to impress your point upon Martin Luther around 1519, and he thumped his Bible and said, “This is ‘real Christianity.’”
— Steve Sailer · Aug 4, 09:49 AM · #
@razib Perhaps you might want to get out a dictionary and look up the word “evangelical” before you move on to advanced concepts like apples and oranges. If there were a tradition in America of Muslims suddenly turning a normal conversation into an attempt at conversion, telling me I will suffer eternal torture if I don’t join their religion, acting as if their religion is so culturally hegemonic that I’m a freak and outcast for not following it, etc., etc. I would get just as tense when a Muslim started gushing as a Christian. But there isn’t. Hence, the gap.
— Jesse F · Aug 4, 01:18 PM · #
I would like to chime in with a hearty “I agree”; but having used “real” as a modifier to suit my own purposes, fear of being called out as a self-serving hypocrite prevents me from doing so.
— Tony Comstock · Aug 4, 02:24 PM · #
well….actually muslims like me and Ibn Arabi and Tariq Ramadan subscribe to islamic pluralism.
and i doubt that muslims even could proselytize christians or jews— we all believe in the same god.
The people of the book are already “saved”.
The truth is, the great majority of muslims don’t give a shit about what xians believe….we just care that xians want to make us believe it too (evangelicalism and proselytizing) …..eg, we would just be thrilled for you to extend the same respectful courtesy of not giving a shit about what we believe to us.
yours is better for you, mine is better for me
Another popular misconception about muslims is Goldberg’s assertion that OBL would describe liberal muslims as apostates. That is false. He thinks we are maftoons , like kapos for jews and uncle toms for black folk.
— matoko_chan · Aug 4, 03:05 PM · #
Reality exists. It is not a concept dependent on the predilections of the one who experiences it. That means there is a real God to those like myself who are believers. St. Augustine said, “Lord, you made our hearts restless until they rest in you.” That means people will worship something even if it is not God. If it is not God, they will worship an idol: drugs, sex, clothes, food, money, gambling, cigarettes, self. In America, the trend is to worship self. Everyone is his or her own movie star. That’s why we have retreated into monads, twittering to the ether, while cutting ourselves off from human contact. There is no other human, just as there is no God, except oneself. For those initiated in the writings and thoughts of saints, or who have had a personal experience of the presence of God, it is ludicrous to deny that there is a real religion. Whatever a person subscribes to, be it Islam, Sufiism, Judaism, Christianity, Bahai, Hinduism, Buddhism, there is a real religion that brings us into personal relationship with God as distinct from a false one that betrays God. Faith is not an achievement. It is a process, leading to sanctity. Holiness does not derive from a concept that there is no real religion, whatever that religion is named. A sign of those who have cut off their innate search for God is that they deny the reality of a religion. If God is not real, we are a lie. It takes discernment, however, to recognize that what someone states is the reality of his or her religion is in fact a lie. Thus, Christians who, in the past, slaughtered the infidel (those who were not Christian) were not following Jesus; they were following Satan. But then Satan quoted Scripture to Jesus in the temptation in the desert. That did not make Scripture evil nor did it make Satan holy. Satan is a liar. As St. Paul writes, Satan is like a prowling lion, waiting to devour us. What better way to convince us there is no God than to deny the reality of religion.
— LDM · Aug 4, 04:03 PM · #
Noah,
Nonsense. I can’t speak for Muslims, not being a Muslim. But there is such a thing as real Christianity. If the majority of ‘Christians’ happened to come to believe that abortion is okey-dokey, or that Jesus was born through the natural process of sexual intercourse, or that Jesus was a great man but not ‘God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God’, or that God is simply an unidvided Unity rather than a Trinity, or that the Eucharist is just a symbol of the body and blood of Christ rather than his body and blood really being present, that would be interesting (and deplorable) but it wouldn’t make what they believed real, genuine, true Christianity. Truth is not determined by majority vote.
— Hector · Aug 7, 10:58 PM · #
Truth is not determined by majority vote.
but it is in al-Islam.
Islam is a consensus religion.
— matoko_chan · Aug 8, 03:04 AM · #
i think this might give TAS readers a lot of insight into the current state of conservatism and the Park51 conservative reactions.
America’s God is Dying.
“America is the first great experiment in Protestant social formation. Protestantism in Europe always assumed and depended on the cultural habits that had been created by Catholic Christianity. America is the first place Protestantism did not have to define itself over against a previous Catholic culture. So America is the exemplification of constructive Protestant social thought.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer thus got it right when he characterized American Protestantism as “Protestantism without Reformation.”
That is why it has been possible for Americans to synthesize three seemingly antithetical traditions: evangelical Protestantism, republican political ideology and commonsense moral reasoning. For Americans, faith in God is indistinguishable from loyalty to their country.”
I would bet big money that 99% of soi disant ‘conservatives’ would selfdefine as nominally christian.
the GOP and the Tea Party are religious parties.
the christian right/GOP/Tea Party/conservatives are expressing their frustration with being unable to successfully proselytize islam. the Bush Doctrine and COIN are both unsuccessful attempts to proselytize western culture in MENA.
Christianity evolved to increase reps by proselytization and Islam evolved to be immune to christian proselytization.
So while muslims can build mosques in NYC, xians can’t build churches in Mecca and Medina.
There was freedom of religion under the Caliphate— jews and christians were citizens. There was just no freedom to proselytize. That is freedom of speech.
the wholly christian right are understandably pissed that 6000 lives in blood and over a trillion in treasure have poured into an unwinnable war….because even when we stand up westernstyle democracy, muslims still vote for shariah like in Iraq.
But they aren’t willing to stop the war on Islam yet.
eventually we will have to stop this proselytization idiocy.
when all our teeth are broken and our purse is empty we will go home, and they still wont be able to build churches in Mecca.
— matoko_chan · Aug 15, 04:50 PM · #