No clever title today

So. The bombings and Syrian refugee crisis have been hitting such a pitch in the media that no-one can avoid hearing about it. Other people have said some of what I would want to say. Better than I can, with my thoughts and feelings all tangled up. The Slacktivist and Scalzi are on rolls:

• Cursed be anyone who deprives the refugee of justice
• Smart people saying smart things (11.20)
• Please don’t suddenly pretend you care about homeless veterans for just as long as it allows you to oppose helping refugees, because that’s hurting both veterans and refugees and it’s making you miserable
• Lancaster County exposes the fraudulent misleadership of GOP governors and candidates
• Proximity, affinity, and mutuality
• Paris
• Frightened, Ignorant and Cowardly is No Way to Go Through Life, Son

I’ve been reading up a bit, trying to catch up on background. And what it shows me is how very ignorant I am in this area. I know almost nothing about the origins, history, culture, and practices of (1) the Islamic geographical world (Middle East, much of Africa, Central Asia, and more); and (2) Islam as a religion. That’s quite a bit of the world and humanity to be this ignorant of. I’ll have to do something about that.

What I do know is that Europe and the Middle East — more accurately, Christendom and Islam — have a history. There were multiple wars under multiple regimes in multiple areas, over many hundreds of years. Most of them involved religion, but I’m not sure how much was actually about religion. It was probably all tangled up, if only because religion was so much a part of foreign policy and daily life at the time. Both sides launched wars of conquest against the other, and succeeded, for a while.

One article I read talked about Dabiq, the Daesh/ISIS proganda glossy mag, and how it repetitively used “crusaders” in place of “Westerners.” For those even shorter than me on medieval history, think “heathen invader”, said in a derogatory tone, spat on, then steeped in a thousand years of bad blood.

Here’s what worries me: how many officials, commanders, and executives making decisions about Muslims or Islamic places are as ignorant as me? Do they even realize how little they know? What are they doing about it?

The entire world is going to have an opinion on what Daesh/ISIS is doing, and the refugees, and I don’t think it’s going to stop soon. Not when Daesh/ISIS wants to be inflammatory. I want my opinion to be informed, which means research. I think a primer on Islam as a religion, including the origins, and the Sunni/Shia split. The Koran, of course. One or more histories of the Islamic world — ideally Western-authored and Islamic-authored, if I can get both. Possibly a copy of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism. Fiction (written or media) by Islamic authors. Truly understanding the spectrum of history and culture that produced both the refugees and those they are fleeing is the least we can do, and it’s what we need to do.