Religion | Virtues of Islam
Discipline, modesty, purity — and war making.
“The face of terrorism not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace, they represent evil and war . . . When we think of Islam, we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world . . .and that’s made brothers and sisters out of every race.” President George W. Bush, September 17 2001, Islamic Center of Washington, D.C.
The assertion that Islam is the ‘religion of peace’ has become a favourite means for the far-right to bait the left online after a terrorist attack.
“The religion of peace strikes again?”
So goes the tart Twitter comment, often followed by a virtual tapeworm of indignation.
Sarcastic remarks have probably rendered this particular rhetorical formulation inert in the battles over Islam’s status in the United States and the Western world.
There is, of course, no religion in the world that can lay claim to temporal peacefulness, though any religion can be a path to spiritual peace.
Our reluctance to state publicly Islam’s long-established connections to warfare point more to the West’s reconceptualisation of warfare and religion than to any supposed problem with Islam.
War bled the West in the 20th century.
War did more to free India from British rule than Gandhi.
War brought the Holocaust, which profoundly changed how we view the nation and ourselves as humans.
War created a million spinsters.
War and the Holocaust broke our final strands with God.
War brought us the potential for instant global annihilation.
War is now commonly regarded as a very bad thing indeed, especially in the West.
We still fight wars, since a war is probably no more avoidable than an earthquake; but we are ashamed to do so.
We have rebuilt much, rebuilt well here and there. I understand that Dresden is to become a fine simulacrum of what it was.
But actually we are living in the burnt out shell of the house our great-grandfathers set on fire.
I know, we have central heating and pizza via Internet so it doesn’t seem so bad.
Technology and science cast a soft, opium spell over us to make the loss almost invisible.
I would not be surprised if, in fact, the rise in illegal drug use in the post-war period is a means to deal with the collective shock caused by the world wars.
“He came back home, and didn’t talk about it.”
So they said of the world war veterans.
I suspect that the wars left families across the West picking psychic splinters from their minds among a thousand gaily decorated supermarkets.
What has changed is that war is no longer regarded as a fine human event.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
The old lie, Wilfred Owen called it.
That was a change.
Before the 20th century it was possible to see war as a heroic and adventurous exercise.
After the industrialised slaughter of the Western Front and the Holocaust this was no more.
And with nuclear war the default for destruction, we came to see war as altogether unthinkable. A war with the Soviet Union would be quite likely to end human life on Earth.
What has been forgotten is that preachers once stood in pulpits to urge their congregations to war.
This war preaching aroused disgust only among the most peripheral forces in society.
Otherwise, the word of God and the word of war were one and the same.
War was glory to God and nation forever and ever, amen.
When we remember this we can see why it was easier to see Islam’s war-like nature in the past.
We saw war as glorious and saw war as a virtue in the religion of the West.
Why would we be shy about admitting its presence in Islam?
‘Hitler’s “religion” is the nearest to Mohammedanism, realistic, earthy, promising the maximum of rewards in this life, but with a Moslem-like Valhalla into which worthy Germans may enter and continue to enjoy themselves. Like Mohammedanism, it teaches the virtue of the sword’ GG Jung, Diagnosing the Dictators (1938).
To cite the numerous times that Islam has been identified as war-like, or connected to warfare would be tiresome. These references abound, even within Muslim literature.
I provide the Jung quote above because it was written at a time when Islam held little interest or fear for Europeans, whose primary political concerns then were Nazism, fascism, and communism.
Islam had little to no temporal power or purchase. There was no particular animus or fear that would lead Jung to compare Nazism and Islam as he does in the article. His association is a dispassionate one between a live, real threat, and what appeared at the time to be a dusty, enervated ancient religion.
Yet it is the military comparison he makes.
Muhammad was a military, political, and religious leader. In this respect he was unlike Jesus and Buddha who — though they obviously tangled with the state — did not form their own states or primarily seek a political change in their lands.
States require violence in order to function and must defend their territory. It was therefore inevitable that as a politician Muhammad would become involved in warfare, and that his creed would become closely associated with its practice.
After his death, the Arab conquest swept out from the Arabian peninsula in a move that turned Islam into a global religion.
Warfare and Islam have, therefore, been closely associated since the religion’s inception.
Even the common Muslim refrain insha’Allah — God willing — is an ideal phrase to hold on a soldier’s lips. It suggests fatalism, trust in God, and resignation in one statement.
What better formulation to have on one’s lips as you charge at an enemy’s trench? What better expression to carry a human forward against steel hail or even the vicissitudes of everyday life?
Warfare and terrorism are quite different concepts, though all war naturally involves an element of terror. To single out Islam as especially terroristic among the world’s religions and political beliefs would be unfair, though it is true that that the tactical form of irregular warfare commonly known as ‘terrorism ’ is currently predominantly used by Islamists.
But to associate Islam with warfare is not unfair. What is unfair is the claim that this is a shameful connection. The West thinks Islam should be ashamed that it has a martial heritage because the West fears war above all else.
War not only seems terrible to us after our exsanguination in world wars; it is also suspect from the liberal perspective that predominates in the West, for war requires martial values promote hierarchy, disciple and duty — concepts that liberalism abhors.
This is one reason why Islam is rhetorically liberated from its heritage by liberals, who cannot see that its war-like nature is among its virtues as a religion.
The hegemonic ideological force in Western societies is liberalism.
Our hegemon has an awkward relationship with Islam in so far as liberalism is cosmopolitan, universalist, and seeks to absorb Muslim populations for economic and ideological reasons.
But as it does so cannot agree with the very virtues Islam promotes as a religion: discipline, purity, modesty, and — as already discussed — martial values.
Liberalism is tolerant of religion only in so far as those religions conform to liberal norms. This means that to preserve the social peace citizens are meant to see themselves as citizens first and religious people second.
This innovation is held by liberals to be responsible for ending the wars of religion that dogged Europe for several centuries.
The liberal view holds that this arrangement results in universal toleration.
Believe what you want only obey (the laws of state) is the maxim.
But this is tolerance from only the liberal perspective. A religious person who believes that their path is the path to God and virtue must wish to see a society where his religion predominates as the just society.
The religious must abandoned their religion if they are to function in liberal society. Their faith must be made like an irradiated bacillus, an impotent entity that contains the shape without the content of faith.
The liberal contention that the private-public divide between religious life and society solves the dilemma of persecution and religious war is doubtful.
Wars of religion were replaced by the bloodier wars of nationalism, imperialism, and totalitarianism.
Secularism does not seem to temper the human taste for blood, if anything secular regimes are more unrestrained and blood hungry than the religious.
States that forsake religion quickly become tyrannical and ultimately succumb to states where at the very least a greater latitude is given to religion.
The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are the central examples in this regard.
This is why I believe that in the current conflict between Western liberalism and the varieties of Islamism it will be the Islamists who will ultimately prevail.
I do not expect the Islamic State to take Rome, as their music video propaganda claims is possible; but I would not be surprised if an Islamic political entity claims that city in my life time.
This does not require me to assert a supernatural belief, though that is my instinct in this regard.
Rather, I hold that religion provides the most potent means to organise, inspire, and perpetuate a group — apart from nationalism, perhaps. And that the group with greater religious coherence possess an important strategic advantage over a group that does not.
The advantage lies in morale, coordination, and probably also demographics. People who believe tend to have more children and though the maw of secular society may claim a few the womb favours the pious.
Set against this level of social coherence Western liberals can offer consumer capitalism, which has been in profound crisis for past ten years except in its ability to create ever greater examples of gross iniquity and corruption; a permissive society that has normalised family breakdown, social dislocation, and probably contributes to the much discussed mental health crisis; and, well, I suppose there’s been interesting architecture — occasionally.
The West sends armies abroad to fight for what, exactly? Western liberal democratic values, strategic advantage, and material gain. The latter two are present in all wars, but this triptych needs a strong first part to please the eye.
Without ideas worth dying for an army cannot prevail, and while Western liberalism offered more than Soviet atheism it offers less than Islam as a political system.
Today our soldiers die for gay rights and education for women. But tomorrow our parliament may vote these out of existence. We appeal to no deeper standard than the popular vote and jurisprudence — both fickle as a whore.
What we abhor today, we celebrate tomorrow.
Islam is not a ‘left-wing’ religion, if there is such a thing it is either Christianity or Buddhism — religions where self-abgnation is given paramount importance.
The self must disappear. The very suggestion points towards equality and so leftism.
Islam is, of course, more democratically organised in its clerical arrangements than — for the greatest contrast — the Roman Catholic Church and so is in a sense more leftist than Christianity. The Muslim clergy, the imams, emerge from the congregation; and there is no equivalent to the pope in the Muslim world.
But its martial spirit requires a hierarchical worldview and a willingness to do actual battle for the faith — even if this is not always substantiated in the clergy.
Further, Islam’s appeal to submit to Allah’s Will is a characteristically rightist outlook, an approach to life that values obedience and loyalty rather than anarchy and self-interest.
Liberalism values rational, enlightened self-interest, autonomy, free thinking and critique, and free expression that does not cause harm to others (commonly interpreted as physical harm).
This worldview meshes both politics and economics. Free market choice is an economic analogue with liberal political freedom. The two concepts emerge at the same time historically and are interdependent in liberal philosophy as both depend on a shared conception of what it is to be human.
Supposedly, anyone can be integrated into liberalism providing they bracket their other beliefs using the public-private divide. When they do so they give priority to the values of liberalism — even if to give priority to these values is to give up their own values.
Liberalism does not usually see this as a problem, since liberals believe they are value free or have long mastered the trick of bracketing beliefs that contradict liberalism.
As a person outside liberalism’s hegemony quickly realises, bracketing one’s beliefs is often tantamount to giving up those beliefs and the social group associated with those beliefs.
Do Christians have any substantial influence over societies where their religion was once hegemonic? Barely any at all, Christianity has been replaced by the secular religion of liberalism.
Liberals and leftists will often say they welcome Muslim immigration to their countries, but they only welcome this immigration in the expectation that Muslims will bracket their faith to sustain liberalism.
The most prominently hostile view towards Islam in the Western media is usually represented by those, such as the late Christopher Hitchens and the still animate Douglas Murray, who say that Muslim immigrants have not, in their view, become sufficiently liberalised.
It is rare — in Europe anyway — to see a political speaker demanding that Muslim immigrants change their faith. This is because it is impossible to make such a demand under the parameters of liberalism.
What liberals and leftists cannot do is praise Islam as Islam because Islam as Islam is contrary to liberalism (as are all the major faiths).
This is one reason why liberalism cannot regard Islam as war-like. Liberalism must make Islam as neutered as the Christian and Jewish faiths in the West.
Western intellectuals live in expectation of the Islam to come, which will be safely subordinate to liberalism.
This is why it is important to recognise Islam’s virtue on its own merits.
Islam has a great many virtues, but I have selected discipline, modesty and purity as the most noticeable as well as the most likely to contradict liberal values.
I am not suggesting that every Muslim adheres to these virtues, as with all faiths there is a spectrum in how people actually practise their faith from those who step inside a mosque twice a year to those who make every effort to adhere to the demands made by their denomination of Islam.
That caveat stated, here we go.
Muslim discipline is evident in several ways.
The call to prayer Muslims answer five times a day (health permitting) places a particular onus on the adherent to act in a disciplined manner.
The nature of prayer itself, with its obeisance to God, contains a strongly disciplined element that produces a pleasing uniformity of action.
The fast for Ramadan also requires immense will power and discipline.
Further, the stricture required to learn the Qur’an by heart — though not undertaken by all Muslims — requires immense discipline and determination.
These actions amount to impressive human achievements.
Discipline on this level is not in accord with liberalism. The desire to maintain the discipline of Islam contradicts rational, enlightened self-interest.
We can already see this in the clashes on French factory production lines over breaks for prayers.
What should come first: The company’s profits, or your — supposedly bracketed — religious convictions? Liberalism knows the answer; it would have Muslims lose what is admirable in their faith to liberal capitalism’s advantage.
Purity and modesty are represented in the Muslim faith in two ways.
The modesty of Islam is evident in its sumptuary laws for women, and its restrictions on alcohol consumption.
The reader may be surprised to see me assert that liberalism is immodest. There are, after all, no prescriptions in liberalism against modesty — an individual may make up their minds how modest they will be in their conduct, and at most liberalism will suggest a utilitarian reason to justify modesty.
But liberalism moves towards the immodest because it is atomistic and utility seeking in its recommendations for human conduct. While in theory this should not lead humans to behave in a less modest way. The practise of liberalism removes any constraints that would preserve modesty. The essence of modesty is restraint, and liberalism must remove restraint to function.
The amenability of consumer capitalism to pornography and the promotion of alcohol consumption is in this respect typical of the way liberalism destroys modesty. The only appeal is to a limited conception of atomistic utilitarian pleasure, which once indulged lowers a human’s dignity. The preservation of this dignity depends upon restriction and concealment.
In a society that prioritises individual pleasure seeking behaviour dignity and modesty will not be maintained.
Purity is best represented in Islam’s codes on washing before prayers, the reverence displayed to the Qur’an, and the respect shown towards Muhammad.
The Muslim commitment to purity is also represented in the faith’s restrictions on contact with animals judged unclean, such as dogs.
Liberalism is not adverse to a materialistic purity on utilitarian grounds, but – as the disputes over publications that choose to publish images of Muhammad has shown – liberalism is prepared to protect the rights of those who defile the purity of Islam with words or images.
This means that liberalism and Islam are at odds over the concept of purity, and a consistent liberal will choose liberalism over purity in so far as liberalism will guarantee the rights of those who would destroy purity in a way that does not conflict with liberalism’s limited conception of harm.
If Muslims were to bracket purity, modesty, discipline, and their marital values they would have given away important, admirable elements in their religion. These are among the virtues that Islam brings to a society where it is established.
However, I suspect that liberalism will not concede ground to Islam in the near future.
The story of the 21st century is the conflict between Western liberalism and Islam, as represented by the various Islamist groups.
I am not sure who is prevailing for the moment, though I know which side has more faith in God and what that usually means.
But I also see dawn’s rosy fingers on a new onion-domed civilisation in Russia.
Ex oriente lux? Perhaps.
