From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Tue 25 Feb 2003 - 20:04:41 GMT
Can good Muslims be good multiculturalists?
Mark Steyn
National Post
The other day, Barbara Amiel was writing about the transformation in
the European view of the United States and Israel, and came up with an
arresting metaphor:
"Laying out the world's changing attitudes to Israel and America so
barely makes it sound like a conscious decision -- which is absurd. But
changes in the spirit of the times are as difficult to explain as those
immense flocks of birds you see sitting on some great African lake,
hundreds of thousands of them at a time, till all of a sudden,
successively, they fly up and turn in a specific direction. One can never
analyze which bird started it and how it became this incredible rush. All
you see is the result."
The world is always changing. In 1967, when the British Parliament
decriminalized homosexuality in the teeth of some pretty vigorous
opposition, no one would have predicted that a mere 30 years later the
Conservative Party would be electing a leader in favour of gay
marriage. If you're a British gay who's been longing to marry since
1967, that's an eternity. But it's a blink in the eye of a very old
civilization's social evolution. Things change. You don't notice the
iceberg melting, only that one day it seems a lot smaller than it was,
and that the next it's not there at all.
So what will the "spirit of the times" look like in the Western world in 10
or 20 years' time? Here's a couple of early birds on the lake, plucked
more or less at random from recent headlines:
1. Last month, Judge Beaumont, the Common Serjeant of London, ruled
that, in the case of a Muslim cleric accused of inciting the murders of
Jews and Hindus, no Jews or Hindus or the spouses thereof could
serve on the jury.
2. On January 21st, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten reported
that the Court of Appeals in Eidsivating had acquitted a Middle Eastern
immigrant of raping a retarded woman on the grounds that he had only
lived 12 years in Norway and so could not be expected to understand
her condition.
The man was 22 years old. Thus, he had lived virtually his entire
conscious life in Norway. But the court ruled that his insufficient
understanding of the language was a mitigating factor. He was a cab
driver and the woman was his customer. She paid for the ride with a
"TT" card -- a form of transport subsidy for the handicapped, which he
evidently recognized because he accepted it. Nonetheless, because of
his "cultural background," an adult who'd lived in Norway since he was
10 years old could not be expected to know that this woman was
mentally incapacitated and that he should not assault her.
3. In the second week of January, Cincinnati's Playhouse In The Park
cancelled its tour of a specially commissioned new play by Glyn
O'Malley called Paradise. The subject of the work was the suicide
bombing of March last year by an 18-year old Palestinian girl, Ayat al-
Akhras. My old friend, the Saudi Minister of Water Ghazi Algosaibi,
wrote a poem in praise of Miss al-Akhras as "the bride of loftiness."
O'Malley's approach was a little subtler. His starting point was a
Newsweek cover story contrasting young Ayat with one of the Jews she
killed, another teenage girl, a 17-year old Israeli, Rachel Levy. To some
of us, this is already obscene -- the idea that murdered and murderer
are both "victims." They're linked only because Ayat couldn't care less
whom she slaughtered as long as they were Jews.
But there wouldn't be much of a play in that. So O'Malley did the decent
liberal thing and bent over backwards to be "balanced." In his play,
"Fatima" gets all the best lines, raging at the Israelis because they
should know better: "How can you do this? You! You who know camps
and humiliation and hate and death." "Sarah," by comparison, is just a
California airhead who's come to Israel for the guys and can't really get
a handle on the Holy Land: "It's, like, old."
But O'Malley didn't stop there: He moved the scene of the bombing from
within Israel proper to one of those "illegal" West Bank settlements. He
even managed to remove any kind of religious component: To dear old
Ghazi, Ayat was acting as a good Muslim; in O'Malley's play, "Fatima"
insists, "This is not about Allah!" This is not some crude Muslim-Jew
thing, but instead arises from complex socio-economic issues
unconnected to one's faith.
And what was the upshot? At a read-through before invited members of
the Jewish and Muslim communities, the latter denounced the work as
"Zionist propaganda." A few days later, the Jewish director was
removed from the production. A few days after that, the play was
cancelled entirely.
What normally happens with "controversial" art? I'm thinking of such
cultural landmarks of recent years as Andres Serrano's Piss Christ -- a
crucifix sunk in the artist's urine -- or Terrence McNally's Broadway play
Corpus Christi, in which a gay Jesus is liberated by the joys of anal sex
with Judas. When, say, Catholic groups complain about these
abominations, the arts world says you squares need to get with the
beat: A healthy society has to have "artists" with the "courage" to
"explore" "transgressive" "ideas," etc. Yet with this play, faced with
Muslim objections, the big courageous transgressive arts guys fold like
a Bedouin tent. And, unlike your Piss Christs, where every liberal
commentator wants to chip in his two-bits on artistic freedom, pretty
much everyone's given a wide berth to this one, except for Christopher
Caldwell, whom The Weekly Standard sent to Cincinnati to interview
the various figures involved. What was interesting from Caldwell's
account was that the Muslim community figures didn't really care in the
end whether the play was pro- or anti-Islam: For them, it was beyond
discussion.
When you soak a crucifix in urine, you may get a few cranky Catholics
handing out leaflets on the sidewalk. When you do a play about suicide
bombers, who knows what the offended might do? The arts world
seems happy to confine its transgressive courage to flipping the finger
at Christians.
These are a few straws in the wind, birds on the lake. They're on the
periphery of our vision right now, but they won't stay there. You may
have heard the statistics -- in Amsterdam the most popular name for
newborn boys is Mohammed, etc. You may be aware that some
waggish Western Muslims refer to the Continent as "Eurabia." The
great issue of our time is whether Islam -- the fastest growing religion in
Europe and North America -- is compatible with the multicultural, super-
diverse, boundlessly tolerant society of Western liberals. This is the
paradox of multiculturalism: Is it illiberal to force liberalism on others? Is
it liberal to accommodate illiberalism? I don't personally care if
Germany waives its regulations on animal cruelty to permit Muslims to
have the source of their meat slaughtered in accordance with Islamic
practice. But then I'm not a member of PETA. And, if I were a feminist or
a gay or an "artist," I wouldn't be reassured by these early birds winging
their way from Norwegian courts and Midwestern playhouses.
Meanwhile, those of us who talk of reforming Iraq are assured by our
opponents that it's preposterous to think that Arabs can ever be
functioning citizens of a democratic state. If that's so, isn't that an issue,
given current immigration patterns, not for Iraq tomorrow but for Britain,
France, Belgium and Holland right now? And shouldn't we at least try to
understand why Muslims in, say, Kazakhstan have been able to
reconcile the contradictions between Church and state?
Given Europe's birthrates, the survival of the West depends on
conversion -- on ensuring that the unprecedently high numbers of
immigrants to the Continent embrace Western pluralism. Some of us
think it would be easier to do this if the countries from which they
emigrate are themselves democratic and pluralist. But to say there's no
problem here except Texan cowboy fundamentalist paranoia is to blind
yourself to reality, to march to suicide as surely as Ayat al-Akhras did.
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