Osama bin Laden, Uomo Fascista

Christopher Hitchens sounds off in today's (Wednesday's) Post on why "Islamo-Fascism" is an apt and descriptive moniker for fundamentalist Muslim jihadism.

It's a fairly good list of how the jihadism and fascism are bad in similar ways, but he completely misses the strongest case for the term out there. To wit: Osama bin Laden says so.

I refer to OBL's latest audio message to his al Qaeda underlings in Iraq, in which he scolds them for pursuing their own factional interests instead of uniting to chase out the infidels and blasphemers. This, apparently, is his explanation for why al Qaeda is getting it's ass kicked at the moment.

Unity, he says, is the answer: "O people, observe obedience and the group, for it is the rope of Allah to which He ordered us to cling."

And then there's this doozy: "Sticks refuse to break when banded together but if they come apart they break one by one."

It's a telling metaphor. Turns out, a bundle of sticks tied together is an ancient image dating back to Roman times. It's name? The fascis. As in, fascism.

There's no coincidence here. The fascis symbolizes "strength through unity," which is the slogan Benito Mussolini picked up early on to define his new political regime. He even used the fascis on his ministerial flag.

Nor, I would suggest, is bin Laden simply picking up on a helpful but isolated metaphor completely detached from his underlying ideology. Fascism has its intellectual roots, broadly speaking in German philosophical romanticism (Hegel, etc.), which postulated a unity of all things completely freed from the confines of Aristotelian logic. That "Unity" -- also called the "Ideal," the "Oversoul," etc -- was considered synonymous with "God."

The God of Islam, of course, is a much more concrete, meat-and-potatoes kind of guy. Kind of. Still, as I argue here (and Pope Benedict argues here), radical Islam retains a fairly troubled relationship with good, old-fashioned philosophical reason of the type that Hegel and his successors passionately reject. And that has troubling implications for the standing of the individual in both cases.

Note that I distinguish here between the jihadist, let's-blow-stuff-up strains of Islam and Islam broadly defined. Whether the clear philosophical problems with the former remain problems with Islam qua Islam, I'll leave up to them to decide.

Some might offer that in either case, the God of Islam isn't nearly as down-to-earth as he should be. But perhaps I digress.

Sex, Sharia, and Foucault

David Frum has a fascinating book review at NRO today about deconstructionist philosopher Michael Foucault's (figurative) love affair with Ayatollah Khomeni and the Iranian Revolution. Apparently Foucault, increasingly discouraged by Marxism's failure to catch on in the West, saw radical Islam as the last best hope of dismantling the old-guard Judeo-Christian/Enlightenment order he detested.

What's more, this book (Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism by Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson) asserts, the Revolution's subjugation of women was not incidental to Foucault's admiration.

Frum's money quote:

QUOTE
Indeed, as Afary and Anderson point out, at the moment of his deepest engagement with the Iranian revolution, Foucault was at work upon the books he regarded as his masterwork, his History of Sexuality – a history that treats the emancipation of women in the later Graeco-Roman period as a catastrophe that put an end to the happy classical period when reproductive sex was regarded as an unpleasant duty, with pleasure to be sought between men and boys.

For Foucault, sexual pleasure was intimately bound to rituals of domination and outright acts of brutality. The Judaeo-Christian attempt to separate sex from cruelty was the poisoned apple in his Garden of Eden. He recognized that the Graeco-Roman world had departed forever. But some part of him seems to have hoped that the Islamic revolution might offer a return.
ENDQUOTE

My thought: a lot of slurs and accusations have been leveled against Christianity over the years, but the charge of separating sex from cruelty is one we should be able to own proudly.

There's a deeper point here, too, one that G.K. Chesterton makes at great length in The Everlasting Man. To wit: if one wants to assess the claims of Christianity, one must really look first at what it replaced. Because it has been so dominant for so long, however, its detractors need not even consider how much their worldview is based on assumptions that were once radically and explicitly Christian. That pederasty is wrong, for instance.

And this, I think, has something to do with why many serious Christian philosophers have actually welcomed the deconstructionism and postmodernism of Foucault and his ilk. It's fatal in large doses, but it does serve as a kind of philosophical diharretic, opening up an entire new language with which to express the thrilling claims of Christianity. And by rejecting en masse the traditions of both Christianity and the Enlightenment, it highlights just how much the latter depends on the former, and how lost we are without it.

UPDATE: I havent read it yet, but I hear that Tod Lindberg's The Political Teachings of Jesus is also excellent--and undoubtedly more scholarly than Chesterton--in parsing out the widespread assumptions of our day that come directly from the Gospels.

The Name above [some] names

I hesitate to attempt any intelligent commentary on this story, if only because I don't want any thoughtful points I make to detract from its all-around creepiness.

So before I go on, please take a moment to read, shudder, and pray for my Church.

Thank you.

Now, can someone please explain to me how Catholics starting to call God "Allah" would do anything to promote religious understanding? True enough, the English word "God," apart from historical context and its distinctive capitalization, doesn't do much to specify Yahweh, the God of Israel, or the Trinity of Christian understanding, and "Al Lah" (The God) is basically its Arabic translation. So it would be only natural that Arabic-speaking (and sure, why not Indonesian) Christians would call God "Allah." (Do they? If I presume wrongly, someone please educate me.)

But I wonder whether Belgium's Islamic community would appreciate the gesture. I'm no expert on Islamic theology when it comes to the name of God, but the only Muslims I've ever discussed the issue with have insisted that the name "Allah" in their understanding refers exclusively to the God of Islam, and any similarity to pre-Islamic Arab words is incidental. (Again, I'd appreciate someone with more knowledge here speaking up.)

In any case, it's highly likely that any such effort would create far more confusion than understanding, and it makes one suspicious that this is simply another example of the term "interreligious understanding" being used as Newspeak for the minimization of crucial differences in belief.

If Bishop Muskens really wants to promote understanding, his energy would be better spent articulating Christian belief, clearly, rationally, and charitably, and expecting the same of other religious leaders.

And speaking of Christian belief, the good Bishop's notion that God doesn't care what he's called is shaky at best. See, for instance, the First Commandment: Thou shalt not take my name in vain. It's true that Christians don't generally call him "Yahweh" (or YHWH) anymore, and that God has many names throughout the Bible, but each one of those many names matters in that it communicates something essential about his character.

Like his revelation to Moses: "I am the God of Abraham, the God if Isaac, the God of Jacob... I AM," which both asserts his transcendent being and defines his identity in specific relationship to the history of Moses' people. Or Jesus' "Abba, Father," a bold assertion of intimacy.

All of which means that while the name "God" is nothing fancy (although, I think, descriptive in its simplicity), why we call him what we do still matters greatly.

And "interreligious understanding" just doesn't cut it.

UPDATE: Robert T. Miller at First Things makes some similar points at greater length.