We’re used to leftist apologists blaming everything done by Islamic terrorists as the fault of the West and not the result of religious beliefs. This is of course a form of apologetics that simultaneously exculpates religion, satisfies the masochistic West-hating of many leftists, and patronizes Muslims: as underdogs, their behavior can’t lie within themselves, but in their stars—i.e., us.
Of course a problem with the “blame colonialism” thesis is that much Muslim violence is directed towards other Muslims (Sunni vs. Shia, for instance), or against groups like the Yazidis that aren’t responsible for “colonialism.” Further, if you read Lawrence Wright’s great book Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (a Pulitzer Prize winner), you’ll hear a persuasive case that the origins of the Muslim Brotherhood, and hence its successor terrorist organizations, lay not in colonialism but in pure hatred of the West’s immorality and modernity.
Nevertheless. the West-bashers and Muslim apologists persist. And now they’ve jumped the last shark, for we have, in the PuffHo, a piece that not only claims that the ubiquitous sex-slavery and rape by ISIS members has nothing to do with Islam, but that it’s actually the result of Western perfidy.
The author is Kecia Ali, an associate professor of religion at Boston University, and her piece is called “The truth about Islam and sex slavery history is more complicated than you think.” (When you see the words “more complicated than you think,” you know you’re in for some apologetics). Her piece was apparently motivated by a recent New York Times article on ISIS’s “theology of rape” by Rukimi Callimachi, a piece I wrote about recently. Callimachi’s piece is mandatory reading.
In brief, Ali’s arguments are these: yes, ISIS practices sex slavery, but that the practice is not inherent in Islam, as some Muslims don’t approve of it. Further, other societies had slaves, too, so human bondage is not uniquely Islamic. (Duh! Is any nefarious behavior limited to only one religion?). Further, ISIS’s sexual depredations are publicized by Western media only because they fit into our desired narrative of Islamic “barbarity.” Finally, the sexual abuse is all our fault: we invaded Iraq, and the U.S. Constitution permits slavery (!!!).
In short, Ali’s argument is so flawed that it is, as Wolfgang Pauli reportedly said about sloppy thinking in physics, “not even wrong.”
Her arguments:
1. Many Muslims don’t sanction slavery and sex slavery, so ISIS’s position isn’t ubiquitous; ergo, it’s not religiously based. Ali’s quote:
Though ISIS soldiers attribute religious merit to enslavement of Yazidi girls and women, many other Muslims, like those ISIS criticizes in its propaganda, oppose its actions and categorically reject the possibility of contemporary slavery. Callimachi suggests that “Scholars of Islamic theology disagree … on the divisive question of whether Islam actually sanctions slavery.” She quotes me expressing the position that “sexual relationships with unfree women” were “widespread” in the seventh century, and not “a particular religious institution.” Princeton theology researcher Cole Bunzel, her opposing voice, disagrees. He points out, reasonably, that repeated scriptural and jurisprudential references to slaveholding (which include the permissibility of sex with “those your right hands possess”) exist. While he notes that “you can argue that it is no longer relevant and has fallen into abeyance, ISIS would argue that these institutions need to be revived.” This is a fair representation of ISIS’s position. Yet this does not mean, as critics of Islam would have it, that the Islamic State’s position on the legitimacy of owning — and having sex with — slaves is unquestionable. (For premodern Muslim jurists, as well as for those marginal figures who believe that the permission still holds, the category “rape” doesn’t apply: ownership makes sex lawful; consent is irrelevant.)
Yes, there’s disagreement among Muslims on this issue, but only because slavery is currently seen as immoral by some. But that isn’t the case in the Qur’an, nor is it in the Bible. As Ali admits, the prophet Muhammed himself owned slaves, including female ones whom he impregnated. Christians have retreated from the Old Testament’s approbation of slavery, but ISIS is not like modern Christianity. ISIS is a group that wants to return to the “fundamentals” of Islam, restoring the original caliphate—a caliphate that, of course, permitted sex slavery. Ali adds this:
Others scholars point out that just because the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it doesn’t mean Muslims must always do so; indeed, the fact that slavery is illegal and no longer practiced in nearly all majority-Muslim societies would seem to settle the point. It is one thing for committed religious thinkers to insist that scripture must always and everywhere apply literally, but it is ludicrous for purportedly objective scholars to do so. Anyone making that argument about biblical slavery would be ridiculed.
Indeed, but recall that the Qur’an is taken far more literally as “scripture” by Muslims of all stripes than is the Bible taken literally by Christians. Ali’s argument here is that because some Muslims don’t accept slavery, then sex slavery doesn’t come from religion and, in fact, that it’s wrong to take it from religion. That’s as fatuous as claiming that because Orthodox and Conservative Jews observe the Sabbath punctiliously, while most Reform Jews don’t, then observing the Sabbath doesn’t come from religion.
In truth, ISIS is perhaps the truest adherent to the original form of Islam, while Muslims who oppose sex slavery, moral as they are, are deviating from the roots of the faith.
2. Because other societies did it too, slavery wasn’t particularly Islamic. Ali:
Still, early Muslim slavery (like early Muslim marriage) wasn’t particularly a religious institution, and jurists’ ideas about the superiority of free over slave (and male over female) were widely shared across religious boundaries.
. . . In the thousand-plus years in which Muslims and non-Muslims, including Christians, actively engaged in slaving, they cooperated and competed, enslaving and being enslaved, buying, selling and setting free. This complex history, which has generated scores of publications on Muslims and slavery in European languages alone, cannot be reduced to a simplistic proclamation of religious doctrine.
And, finally, since other tyrants in the Middle East promote sexual abuse for ideological reasons, it can’t be religious:
By focusing on religious doctrine as an explanation for rape, Americans ignore the presence of sexual abuse and torture in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and in Assad’s Syria by the regime and other factions in its vicious ongoing war.
This is the argument that if some evil deeds are practiced by diverse societies, and for diverse reasons, then religion is exculpated. It’s like saying that because Jews cut off the foreskins of their male infants, and so do Muslims, then that’s not based on religion at all. I’m distressed, but not surprised, that a scholar like Ali can make an argument like this—one that exculpates Islam as a motivation for any evils. But this is what we’ve learned to expect from left-wing academics; and I’m sad to say that my beloved Left is now practicing such intellectual sleight of hand.
3. The West is exaggerating the dimension of the problem. Get this:
None of this is to deny the horror of the systematic rapes Callimachi reports or the revolting nature of the theology she describes. It is to point out that there are reasons why the story of enslaved Yazidis is one that captures the front page of the New York Times: it fits into familiar narratives of Muslim barbarity.
Now there’s West-bashing raised to a high art! Although the New York Times may have a liberal slant, the Yazidi story (which was extremely powerful) is only one of a series on ISIS’s actions, and it’s there not because it demonizes Muslims, but because it alerts us to the horrors going on in the Middle East, horrors that we all must understand and ultimately address.
4. Finally, it’s all the West’s fault anyway. Ali’s last paragraph gives the game away:
In focusing on current abuses in the Middle East, perpetrated by those claiming the mantle of Islam, Americans — whose Constitution continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime — deflect attention from partial U.S. responsibility for the current crisis in Iraq. Sanctions followed by military invasion and its brutal aftermath laid the groundwork for the situation Callimachi describes. Moral high ground is in short supply. The core idea animating enslavement is that some lives matter more than others. As any American who has been paying attention knows, this idea has not perished from the earth.
Please, Dr. Ali, could you tell us: given ISIS’s aim of restoring the Caliphate and its murder of other Muslims and non-colonial Yazidis, how our invasion of Iraq, dumb as it was, “laid the groundwork for the situation Callimachi describes”? Is our invasion of Iraq morally equivalent, as you imply, to the rape, torture, and enslavement of thousands of Yazidi women, and the murder of their husbands and sons? Are we to be held responsible for every act of torture and brutality committed by terrorists in the Middle East?
I reject that claim, and make the counterclaim that Ali is trying to exculpate not only Islam, but Muslims, from the acts they commit, blaming those acts on us instead. That’s false and patronizing, as well as unscholarly and disingenuous. Ali has a bill to sell, and is clearly not an objective scholar.
As for the US Constitution permitting enslavement, well, click on the link Ali provides, and it takes you to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, to wit:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
That eliminated slavery and peonage in the U.S., a decision buttressed by the Peonage Act of 1867, which prohibited holding people in involuntary servitude until they work off debts. If enslavement and involuntary servitude remain, it is as criminal punishment, when prisoners must work as a condition of their sentence. (The more onerous forms of this, like chain gangs, no longer exist. Now prisoners make license plates, work in machine shops, or tend gardens.) But work as punishment is not at all equivalent, despite what Ali implies, to what ISIS is doing to Yazidi women. Her bringing up the very strict 13th Amendment, which basically outlawed all slavery of non-convicts, is meant to deflect attention from ISIS’s sex slavery.
I have to say that I find Ali’s argument truly revolting—not just because it’s intellectually weak and actually deceptive, but because it debases the entire realm of university scholarship of which I’m a member. When I see pieces like hers—lame apologetics that are meant from the outset to reinforce an opinion already held—I thank Ceiling Cat that I am a scientist: a member of the guild in which using your scholarship to reinforce emotional commitments is considered a sin.
Her web, “handle” wouldn’t happen to be, “Vierotchka”, would it?
Now THAT was an unreally well thought, written, fact-based and not faith-based, appropriate response to the Boston professor.
Still, it is revolting to realize that we are still arguing if sex slavery is justifiable or not justifiable, in year 15 of the 21st century.
How can that be? What happened to Kecia Ali’s neurons? Tasered to death by her faith?
So…if it OK to blame colonialism for the bad deeds committed by some in the middle east, can we also blame Great Britain for the slavery that existed in the pre Civil War United States?
Why, yes. And the Dutch for selling them ebony.
I’d say the answer is NO. And just how could we blame them in the first place. We were colonies by choice and considered ourselves British subjects until 1770s. Also, England outlawed slavery well before our civil war and they didn’t have to wipe out 600,000 people to do it. Had we followed their lead we might have saved a few deaths.
They didn’t have big plantations to work.
I’m a big fan of these responses to the liberal, academic excesses that try to exculpate Islam’s violence by laying the blame on the West. I like your posts on the subject because you aren’t a right wing ideolog making a knee jerk responses (as it eventually turned out Pat Condell was doing), but rather you make informed, considered responses that hold people accountable for their own actions and give religion no special exemption from scrutiny.
All of that is really a preamble to my discomfort with the fact that the US Constitution does explicitly allow slavery. Even as a punishment I find the allowance problematic – not so much conceptually, though there is that, but practically, because we know our justice system is so racist, classist and broken. The US has more people incarcerated than any other country on the planet, both in absolute numbers and per capita. So limiting slavery to convicted prisoners is not as limited as it ought to be. And, as it turns out, not necessarily limited to convicts, as even detainees subject to pre-trial detention (jail) may find them selves forced into labor (though, perhaps, in contravention of the constitution).
But, back to IS sex slavery. Yeah, that’s on them. Despicable in every way.
I agree with you about slavery being wrong, even as a punishment – prisoners should have a choice about whether they work.
However, I really don’t think that when DAESH were formulating their policies around Yazidi sex slaves, the US constitution came up in the conversation. I mean, how would that have gone exactly:
“We don’t need to worry about America’s disaproval here because they make their prisoners work. Why, the ‘New York Times’ probably won’t even write about it because of that.”
Slavery, including sex slavery, still exists in most countries in the world, despite its illegality. DAESH (which considers itself a state even if no one else does) is unique in sex slavery being an official government policy. They justify that using religion. There’s no getting around those facts.
If you give prisoners the “right” to refuse to work, why don’t you just go ahead and give them the “right” to refuse punishment of any kind? One might say it comes under the heading of, “cruel and unusual”, but that’s a different discussion.
There’s a VAST difference between a prisoner being forced to work as part of his punishment and a person who’s being forced to do something incidental to the fact the they are OWNED, as property, by another human being. Ali’s statement (I’m not going to give her the term of respect of, “Dr.”), “….the fact that slavery is illegal and no longer practiced in nearly all majority-Muslim societies would seem to settle the point” is one that I’d be willing to bet a hundred dollars she pulled directly out of her butt: human trafficking and slavery is widespread in this world, and most of it occurs in Muslim countries. How many news stories in the past few years have you seen of wealthy Muslims (Hindus do it too), even while living in the West, being found to have literally “enslaved” household workers?
If it’s a part of the punishment, such as community service, then that’s fine. Where I have a problem is if the punishment is 1 year in prison, then they’re forced to work on top of that. The legal punishment is depriving them of their liberty. If they want to work while they’re in there, that’s good, and good on them, and a mark in their favour, but it shouldn’t be compulsory if it’s not part of their legal punishment.
I didn’t actually explain myself very well in the first bit I wrote – I made it sound like work shouldn’t be part of a legal punishment. That’s not what I meant – I meant prisons shouldn’t be able to enforce work in addition to what sentence has been handed down. I hope the above clarifies my position.
Why should they get a choice when the rest of us don’t? The choice for most of us is “work or die”, which isn’t much of a choice at all.
Two differences:
1. We get paid
2. We can quit
Are you proposing to offer prisoners those options? 😉
cr
Quitting isn’t really an option for many people; they live paycheck to paycheck. And even when they can quit, they just have to find a new job; for many, the new job is no better than the old one.
As for pay, that equals nothing other than survival for many people. Pay for food, rent, clothes and the money is gone. Slaves receive all those things.
This is why Marx called these people “wage slaves”.
And this differs from all of human history, how? Struggle to survive is the fate of pretty much ANY species. Why should anyone take care of you if you decide not to work?
And even a dreary job in the in developed world is a lot less destructive than most labor even a century or two ago. I guess you could decide to quit planting and harvesting because, you know, it’s ‘boring’ and you ‘don’t get real fulfillment’.
This is how far we’ve come. Fluffy gibberish.
First of all, don’t be a jerk.
Second of all, you didn’t pay attention to the gist of the conversation, so your comments are off target.
My overall point is that slavery is merely a point on a continuum; there are many conditions which aren’t technically slavery, but have all of the bad attributes of slavery, maybe worse.
I don’t think slavery is inherently wrong, but it does present opportunity for human beings to treat other human beings very badly. We know from experience, when they can, they will.
Okay, I agree with you on the continuum.
However, bad social conditions ‘on the outside’ can’t justify bad treatment of prisoners.
I side with Heather in that the court should decide punishment, the jail should not have the option to add work to it if the sentence did not call for it. If the work is optional, then okay.
cr
I agree with that. I dislike the attitude that we seem to have that once someone is in jail, we can do whatever we want to them, because they deserve it. Raped? Well, they’re in prison, so they brought it on themselves.
To call work required for prisoners, slavery is just a bit of a stretch in my definition. Does anyone own these prisoners? Are they all to work for life? Are they being bought and sold?
Did they get into prison in most cases through no act of their own. The answers are no and it is a far distance to travel from prison work to the cotton fields and cane fields of the south 200 years ago or to the slave ships who brought them here.
I don’t think we really need to get into a one upsmanship game where only the absolute worst conditions of slavery count as slavery. Calling slavery slavery is not a zero sum game.
Another aspect of her twisted apologetics is her saying that slavery is not, “unique” to Islam, but practiced over centuries by many religions and for many different reasons. This is “minimizing”; basically saying, “it’s not so bad- you see, they’re all doing it, TOO!” It also is an attempt to “discredit” the source of any criticism of her stance, conveniently overlooking the fact that the U.S. did away with, “ownership” slavery almost 150 years ago, while ISIS is happily engaged in it NOW.
What’s that saying? “It is useless to try to use reason to dislodge a person from a position they hold, if that position was not acquired by reason.”
I agree – that’s a completely illogical argument, and holds not water.
Alas, the way the American prison system works, “slavery” is much too accurate a description for our societal good.
Prisons are a booming big business in America — very profitable for the private companies that run them. Not only do they get significant government funds per head, they also run light industry factories in the prisons and pay the prisoners pennies an hour, keeping the profits to themselves. There is significant financial advantage to the companies to increase their head count, which they do both by doing what they can to hold on to prisoners as long as possible and to lobby for an ever-expanding list of offenses with harsher and harsher sentences. The various “three strikes” laws were a practical gold mine for them.
It gets worse when you look at the demographics. Blacks and other minorities are overwhelmingly disproportionately represented…and the crimes they’re in for are for laws with overwhelmingly disproportionate racial targeting. For example, crack cocaine is punished far more harshly than powdered, and the only significant difference between the two is the demographic makeup of the users.
Heather has it right. Vocational rehab should definitely be a part of the prison system — but it should be entirely voluntary, and all work should be paid at the same rate as would be paid outside of prison. The pay doesn’t have to be made available to the prisoners while in prison, but it should be an option to send it to family on the outside or invest in a bank account available on release or the like.
…and let’s not even get started on the prison rape crisis, or any of the other horrors that go on there.
You know how today we’re ashamed of the treatment of the mentally ill in institutions a century (and less) ago? My mind is blown that we don’t feel similar shame about criminals today.
b&
I agree with everything you say.
Sorry, I can’t resist. There should be a duty of care to all prisoners. Violence and/or rape by fellow inmates cannot be condoned in any way, although some people seem to think that these are a legitimate part of the punishment. Prisoners so treated should be entitled to legal redress against the prison authorities.
The desperation of many Muslim thinkers to gain the moral high ground with such weak arguments is depressing. Having managed to get much criticism of Islam labelled as Islamophobia and therefore on par with traditional Western Antisemitism (which is ridiculous) we are now supposed to believe the “invasions” following 9/11 along with the existence of Israel and other Western meddlings are the “true” causes of Muslim outrage.
Sadly at the root of Muslim outrage is the inability of any societies dominated by theocracies to deliver the promises made accordingly the rest of humanity must be made the scapegoats. That means the five or six billion non Muslims who Allah (for some perverse reason) has allowed to share the planet with them.
As variations on this martyr theme have been played out since the first scribe wrote the first word of the Koran we might reasonably wonder if it sounded any more realistic to past generations.
Well put.
It’s academics like this who give academics a bad name.
agreed.
I firmly agree that this is all Obama+Erdogan’s fault, but arguing the Islamic State’s slavery is somehow non-Islamic gets nobody anywhere. Clearly, the Islamic State intends to base itself off Sunni Islamic principles/fundamentals, and no Sunni caliphate banned slavery until at least the 19th century. There was no reason for anyone to revive slavery in Iraq and Syria in the 21st century but for this long tradition of toleration of slavery. Sex slavery is not necessarily religious in nature (e.g., China, early 20th century), but in the case of the Islamic State, it definitely is.
insane
Does anything of worth ever come from the mouth or the pen of a theologian?
Amazing how the blindingly obvious manages to escape everybody’s attention.
Let’s even grant for a moment that there’s nothing in the Q’ran which can justify DAESH’s various crimes in this day and age.
That still does nothing whatsoever to address the indisputable fact that the Q’ran very clearly describes Muhammad and his merry men as having committed these exact same atrocities — and with no regrets for having done so.
That is, even if you want to claim that even a lurid account of Muhammad doing exactly what the DAESH barbarians are doing doesn’t justify their actions, you’re still left with Muhammad himself being exactly the same sort of barbarian as would fit right in with DAESH today.
And we’re supposed to respect this monster’s opinions on matters of morality? Or respect those who draw their own sense of morality from “interpreting” his words?
All that writ, it’s also worth noting that the Bush and Obama strategies in Iraq couldn’t have been better crafted to have brought about the mess we find ourselves in today. Iraq was a mess under Hussein, yes, but not quite as bad a mess as their neighbors to the north (Syria) and south (Saudi Arabia). Our invasion did a spectacular job at destroying the existing sociopolitical infrastructure. Our pathetically lame attempts at rebuilding that infrastructure, of “nation-building,” did nought but pump huge amounts of money and arms into the hands of those who would betray us at the drop of an hat — and, of course, when the hat did drop, they betrayed us.
Might as well blame a rooster for being vicious after it’s been beaten and starved and fitted with spurs in preparation for the cockfighting ring.
b&
Yes. The West bears much responsibility for what is going on now. They created the conditions that both led to the formation of DAESH and enabled it to spread so easily into the Sunni areas of Iraq.
However, the attempt to remove all blame from the tenets of Islam is a step too far. DAESH sees as Islamic caliphate as a return to a better time, amongst other things. With determinism, isn’t it more likely that they’d revert to what their religion teaches them than a society like Denmark, Sweden, Norway, or New Zealand?
Oh, most certainly. Had we done something similar in some other part of the world, there would have been nasty repercussions there, as well. But the fact that the nasty repercussions in Iraq are an enthusiastic embrace of Bronze Age brutality…that’s 100% on Islam.
b&
sub
“Our invasion did a spectacular job at destroying the existing sociopolitical infrastructure.”
and killing thousands of civilians…
“dumb invasion” is quite a euphemism.
Our country does carry a lot of the blame, and rightly so, for the current situation:
The Bush administration’s pathetic ignorance of the geopolitics of the region (primarily that, in Muslim countries, to one extent or another, religion and politics are one)and of the profound extent of the religious hatreds endemic to it; the failure to immediately secure Iraq’s borders (there were miles-long caravans of trucks carrying looted munitions, heavy equipment, and supplies of every kind crossing the border for months after the invasion); the “ham-handed” destruction of the infrastructure necessary to rebuild a society and the corrupt, inefficient attempts to rebuild it, and, worst of all, the delusion that Iraqis would just “come to their senses” and seize upon democracy as a form of government when not only had they never experienced it, it was at odds with their religion which, having been suppressed by Saddam, re-emerged with renewed fervor.
That being said, the Koran (as well as the Babble) are like land mines: they lie there benignly, sometimes for centuries, but given the right conditions, they are written in such a way as to ALWAYS give “divine” justification, at an extremely deep and emotional level, to all forms of injustice and barbarity.
sub
I find this person’s assertions morally repugnant because when she tries to demonstrate that the US somehow allows slavery, she creates a false equivalency that dismisses the distressingly violent world these poor Yazidi women must try to survive in.
As I’ve said before, when liberals support values that are in complete opposition to their own for the sake of multicultural inclusiveness, they silence and indeed subjugate those liberal Muslims whose values they share.
Exactly – this brings to mind the excellent post you did on the Canadian Atheist website recently that has received such a lot of comment.
This person’s attempt to exculpate Islam from any blame is ridiculous. It reminds me of the ‘Hitler was an atheist’ narrative to try and remove all blame from Christianity for his mindset.
It’s at least a little reassuring to see the overwhelmingly negative response this article has received in the comments section over at the Huffington Post. Considering how consistently vacuous and religion-friendly their editorial line is, and considering the number of…how can I put this gently?…fuckwitted hippies who clog up the comments with inane new-agery and petty, illiberal, Chomsky-esque ‘enemy-of-my-enemy’ arguments, it’s heartening to see that even the left’s battalion of ‘useful idiots’ begins to bridle when Islamic apologists plumb depths like this.
I would suggest reading Ibn Warraq’s Why I’m Not A Muslim, particularly the sections on The Betrayal by the Intellectuals (“Trahison des Clercs”):
“barbarity”. Let us call a spade a spade.
I mourn the days when left politics meant a concern for equality and fairness rather than, as now, hatred of the west.
On one political website discussing the ISIS rapes, I pointed out how similar this was to what Moses did the the Midianites: killed the men, but that was not enough, killed all the women except the virgins and gave the virgins to the Israelites.
For pointing out those similarities, I was labelled anti Semitic.
I don’t have enough face or palm to put this into perspective. I’ve always held that being a through-going Liberal (and it’s hard to get much farther left than me without your sanity being questioned) meant following the evidence, wherever it led. Ali’s rationals just blow me away.
There was a recent mass murder in South Carolina in the U.S., the alleged perpetrator stated his motivations clearly, it was about race. I’ve talked to some far right people who have tried to say it was about something else, but when the actor says it is about race, then I pretty much think it was about race.
The serial raping of Yazidi women isn’t any different. If the perpetrators of these crimes claim that they are based on their understanding of Islam, then I pretty much think it was about religion.
I think, at least I hope, Ali’s position is in the minority of the liberal consensus.
Oh, it’s far more than merely “based on their understanding of Islam. To wit:
That’s right. This rape isn’t merely Islamic; it’s explicitly an Islamic prayer. These sick fucks are raping girls as a sincere act of worship.
How the fucking fuck could it possibly get more fucking Islamic than that?
b&
Why aren’t professors like Ali who make this kind of un principled bullshit forced to be out in forums to defend this?
Colleges and liberal arts programs are just so embarrassing.
It’s surprisingly common for people to treat specific applications of an overall abstract concept as as somehow the same in all regards i.e. all religious beliefs are the same. I would capture the false premises and conclusions as follows:
Premise 1: Details are irrelevant.
Premise 2: If something is present in two different situations but they have different outcomes, it doesn’t play a role.
Premise 3:If something isn’t present in one of two situations that had similar outcomes, it doesn’t play a role.
Conclusion 1: Religion is everywhere and some places don’t have sex slaves, so religion doesn’t play a role anywhere in sex slavery.
Conclusion 2: Religion isn’t present in some places that have slavery, so it doesn’t have anything to do with slavery anywhere else either.
I think the headline is a little bit misleading. I’d expected some crank argument that ISIS had got their ideas along those lines from watching Western porn sites, or something of the sort. I’d make a small bet someone will come up with that one, sooner or later.
(Do I blame ISIS on ‘the west’? No. I blame ISIS on G W Bush and Tony Blair and their insane invasion of Iraq. The rest of the West didn’t want a bar of it. That said, ISIS are the evilest bastards since the Nazi party and should be stomped by any means possible.
Of course, what with ‘talks to God’ Bush and Blair with his Catholic-addled brain, it all still comes back to religion.)
“No. I blame ISIS on G W Bush and Tony Blair and their insane invasion of Iraq”
This is how the illogic starts. GWB’s poorly thought out policies DID NOT create ISIS any more than the Soviet’s policies or Israel’s policies did. NOTHING that ‘the West’ did or could do made these people barbaric.
It’s bad logic and bad policy to somewhat excuse this behavior. They alone are responsible.
So- you’re saying that if Saddam had never been deposed that ISIS would have emerged anyway? Possibly, but it would have been a lot more difficult for them. We did not directly “create” ISIS, but we helped create the conditions that made it easier for it to come into existence.
I’m not excusing ISIS in any way. They’re complete arseholes.
That doesn’t excuse Bush and Blair for their utter stupidity. The entire rest of the world told them what would happen and they wouldn’t listen.
If some stupid bugger lets a pack of rabid mad dogs loose, you shoot the mad dogs. Then you shoot the stupid bugger who did it, so he doesn’t do it again.
cr
Yes…and no.
Many of these people were barbaric before the invasion, yes.
But these barbarians weren’t in power before the invasion, and had no possible path to power before then.
And then we came along and bulldozed a path to the palace for them, and lined the path with cash and guns. We took them by the hand, showed them around, taught them how to use the guns…and then smiled and waved as we rode off into the sunset, “Mission Accomplished.”
Even if I grant that the leadership truly was that clueless about it all, that still doesn’t excuse them. Everybody not in the leadership said this would happen, and they did fuck-all to even pretend to do anything that might mitigate it. Hell, quite the contrary…we even turned Saddam’s “justice” into a circus act, complete with public execution.
As I wrote before and as I’m sure I’ll write again…the U.S. could not have architected a more effective strategy to ensure barbaric Muslims would seize power in Iraq than the course of action we took.
b&
A few further comments. This is where the ‘left’ goes wrong. When a minority or disadvantaged ethnic or cultural group, the knee jerk reaction is to blame these peoples’ behavior on someone else, typically the US, Europe or Israel. They refuse to put the blame where it belongs.
To follow this crazy logic, who is making the US or ‘white Europeans’ behave so badly. Who is it hat is forcing them against their will to cause these things?
The weird thing (well, not so weird really) is that during the heyday of the USSR, North Vietnam, Cuba etc, the left NEVER blamed them for causing these problems, instead it was the relatively liberal regimes that got the blame.
Despite language to the contrary, the left has NOT been about liberal government in the enlightenment sense. They have always been authoritarian at heart (driven by their Marxist roots) and it shows when they get political power.
Er, the left doesn’t have “Marxist roots”; Marxism is just a leftist ideology. The left existed before Marxism.
The left isn’t inherently authoritarian, or at least no more so than the right. Many political scientists claim that the authoritarian/libertarian axis is orthogonal to the liberal/conservative axis:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/
As dr coyne mentions patronizing: what else do Muslim terrorists need to to to convince us to take them seriously? They must be wondering themselves…
Recently a big head at ISIS contended that Obama is wrong when he says that their behavior in unislamic- “we get everything we do from the Quran”. Like god itself Islam gets a great break with western apologists. Everything horrible is”unislamic” and everything good ( there must have been some) is “Islamic”. There is no good religion just good behavior
And now the pigfuckers have blown up the ruins at Palmyra.
The destruction of our history that’s going on over there is such a tragedy. I don’t want to sound like I’m minimizing the human costs, but humanity will survive this – we can never get back all the history these groups have destroyed.
Kecia Ali has the luxury of hand waving from a nice and comfortable distance, which has an effect of numbing her brain in proportion to that distance.
Put her slippers on the ground where these acts are being committed and lets hear if her snivelling apologetics would carry the same illusionary weight she tries to apply to her piece.
I simply don’t give a f**k about religion in this barbarity although of course, I recognise it’s role, it is humanity that is being walked over and pissed on.
All the while with our prissy little arguments these people are living in hell, she should be saying something useful..
Why as a women, can she even contemplate defending sex slavery by trying to excuse this extreme Islam in this way.
It is like, the rape is going on over in that corner but history shows you lot did it, so where’s the harm, her brain is not engaged and proves.. yes Professor, not everyone in asteemed places of learning are worthy of being there. Forgive me, for I have sinned and I don’t care.
I have this very uneasy feeling that they are paying the price for the rest of us, without these terrible religious wars that fall squarely in the tribalistic extremist Islam lap, we cannot move on.
Held captive by decades of brainwashing, she is a good example of, “Stockholm syndrome”.
What Academia in general and Boston College specifically might ask is why do we have associate professors in Theology? I have a hard time coming up with a greater waste of time or space.
Sorry but I’m with Thomas Jefferson on this one, who saw no need for a department of Theology at his University.
I’m with you there. Religious studies – yes, but theology does not belong in any respectable university.
The post specified Boston University rather than Boston College. The latter is a Jesuit university, so of course it would teach theology. Boston U. is also a private institution, one descended from a founding as a Methodist seminary. This would help explain its continuing to have a department of theology.
Clearly you haven’t cultivated the works of this academic. https://twitter.com/rjacksonterror
He wrote similar stuff, much before Kecia Ali.
Check the twitter account, you’ll find a lot of comedy gold.
Without knowing if Kecia Ali is a Muslima herself, I find this quote quite fitting:
“If you have a problem with your religion’s fundamentalists, you probably have a problem with your religions’s fundamentals.”
— Seth Andrews on TheThinkingAtheist podcast
Just replace the word “your” with “a” and it’s universally applicable.
I would like to hear Kecia Ali’s definition of Muslims and how she recognizes them, since she speaks of “those claiming the mantle of Islam”.
I wouldn’t be too sure that chain gangs no longer exist (in the US). Look at Joe Arpaio’s “concentration camps” [his description] for drug offenders in Arizona.
I’ve seen ’em. More recently, I’ve seen unchained prisoners doing roadside trash pickup…that I have less of a problem with, provided (see Heather) it’s part of the court-ordered community service portion of a convicted criminal’s sentence. Or, of course, if the prisoners legitimately volunteer.
I’ve no clue how Arpaio is managing these things. He doesn’t give a flying fuck about the law, only his Judge Dredd sense of “justice.” Why he himself isn’t behind bars is a mystery to me.
b&
In summary, we can also say transubstantiation is not a religious doctrine because some Catholics disagree with it.
Hell, let’s take it one step further, no religious action is actually religious because somewhere there’s a religious person who disagrees with it.
You jest, but there are many who would vehemently argue that the Pope isn’t Christian….
b&
Thank Ceiling Cat, Indeed!
Jerry, I’m afraid that I must agree with Ali on Point 4. Although brutal Islamic terrorism has existed for decades, strong secular governments nonetheless maintained stability and ensured that radical Islamism was curtailed. By invading Iraq, the U.S. created a power vacuum in the center of the Mideast, leading to the rise of a Sunni insurgency in the North that eventually morphed into ISIS.
I would argue that the actions of the Bush administration were not only morally equivalent to those of ISIS, but actually far worse. The administration *intended* to create an insurgency in Iraq, as the preponderance of evidence suggests. Invading Iraq, we *intended* to create a state of instability, violence, sectarian strife, and terrorism, and these deliberate actions directly led to the deaths of some 450,000. The supposed “mistakes” of our early occupation, including the debaathification of the country which led former soldiers to the insurgency, the failure to procure adequate troop numbers, the failure to provide counterinsurgency training for troops, the lack of counterinsurgency equipment provided, and the failure to adequately plan an occupation, were deliberate measures meant to produce an insurgency and civil strife. Why? To produce profits for mercenaries and military contractors, providing a pretext for the ongoing feeding of the military-industrial-financial machine of greed.
^ this assessment is literally insane.
US wanted an insurgency? US wanted chaos? And then it sends additional 30k troops for a pacification surge? Yeah.. thats it.
The additional 30,000 troops did not significantly curb violence in the Sunni provinces of Iraq. The decline in sectarian tensions began prior to 2007, as the ethnic cleansing in many Iraqi cities was complete, reducing the prevalence of areas with large Sunni and Shiite populations. Troop levels were already at 140k; in order to launch an effective occupation, some 500k troops would have been required. Thus, the surge, as such, would have been ineffective, even on paper, for reducing violence, and the decline of violence was due to other factors (including the Sunni Awakening).
The troop surge did, however, fulfill one of the key goals of the occupying forces; that is, increasing profits for weapons systems contractors and mercenary groups. The surge partly relied on private security contractors, and the provision of additional equipment (armored cars, tanks) generated income for powerful weapons manufacturers including General Dynamics. Thus, the surge fulfilled the original purpose of maximizing war profiteering, offering a pretext for allocating ever more government funds to institutions in positions of immense public and private power. If we had invaded Iraq with 300k troops, and effectively planned an occupation, no insurgency would have started in the first place, and military intervention would be limited to perhaps a few months. The surge, however, lasted some two years (into 2008) as violence had *already had a chance to begin*. Thus, key failures during the *start* of the occupation afforded the opportunity for a long, profitable surge at the tail end of the war.
This is how far the termites have gotten.
Prototypical Chomsky school of West-hatred.
This btw, is the most racist of all views and positions, because it treats all non-white/western actors as children, incapable of making their own decisions, always hamstrung by the invisible nefarious designs of ‘imperialists’ or ‘zionists’ or some other western bogeyman, never the fault or outcome of decisions made by the ‘brown’ people themselves or their ideologies or beliefs.
It treats the issue of racism, colonialism and imperialism as an exclusive province of Western nations, when in fact virtually every country, culture and ethnic group practiced one or all three of these during their history.
Great response. However, I reject the idea that the invasion of Iraq was a dumb idea. Hussein harbored terrorists, this is a proven fact, but let’s assume that he didn’t, he and his regime would still be most deserving of everything that happened. Hussein and the Baath party were essentially a criminal syndicate that did nothing but destabilize, or prevent any hope of stabilization I should say, of the entire region. Initially I was entirely against it, that was the liberal wave that most people surfed, especially since a republican, Bush, was seen as the head of the idea. Then I learned about Hussein and his activities. No, there was no WMD, but yes, Hussein was aiding terrorists and Muslim extremists determined to strike at western civilization. Do I need to mention his ongoing attempts at genocide. There was no way,in a moral sense, that the west with its power could sit back and do nothing any longer. If we did, then we would be immoral and open to tremendous criticism. And I’m not talking about his actions in the nineties, although that would be enough. Hussein and his sons were genocidal maniacs that deserved to be toppled. If you would like to say the way it was handled was ‘dumb’, I’m all with you. I will not, however, ride the partisan bleeding heart liberal wave regarding the invasion simply because a Bush was in the Presidency and no WMD was found. Not any more, at least. Those who would like to call out our inaction in other areas, save it. Not being able to act within one region does not mean that we should not act in another region in which we can. The lefts irrational defense of Hussein and his regime, in efforts to criticize the Iraq war along with their apologetics for Islam in general, is exactly what made me turn my back on the modern American ‘liberal’. I don’t think they are liberal at all anymore. They are moral relativists who no longer stand behind liberal values if those values may offend a group of people.
First, Iraq and al Qaeda were bitter rivals who wanted nothing to do with each other.
Second, Iraq, bad as it was, was significantly more secular and liberal than Saudi Arabia has ever been. Aside from the oil wealth, you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between the Saudi regime and ISIS, including all the brutal executions and torture and the brutalization of women and the rest. Any argument that you could possibly make that Iraq somehow “deserved” to have these horrors inflicted upon them would apply doubly so to Saudi Arabia. And, of course, to Syria, to Iran, to Afghanistan, to Pakistan, and so on. Or, for that matter, to North Korea or Somalia or countless other nations across the globe.
I’m not even remotely pretending that Hussein was a good guy or that Iraq was some sort of paradise. Rather, my point is that the mere fact that some place is a shithole ruled by a dictator isn’t even remotely enough reason to justify invasion and destabilization and ruin.
Just because you might want to change something doesn’t mean that it’s in your power to do so — and it especially doesn’t mean that doing something, anything, is better than just standing by and watching. There are lots of cases where doing nothing is far and away the least worst thing you can do; Iraq was a textbook example of such.
b&
I most thoroughly agree with Ben.
Unfortunately it became obvious that, Weapons of Mass Delusion or no, UN inspectors or no, Bush wanted a war and he was going to have one regardless of what Saddam did and regardless of what the rest of the world thought.
It was quite predictable that, however bad conditions in Iraq might be, invading the place was only going to make a worse mess.
cr
It’s undeniable that the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, and our horrific actions there, did lead to massive sectarian violence and the rise of ISIS. Ask any intelligence expert, and they’ll tell you this. Even in 2004, the pro-war International Institute for Stratgic Studies stated that the invasion had led to more radicalisation and had perversely inspired more support for Al-Qaeda.
And, no, we didn’t invade Iraq for benevolent reasons – we did it to secure strategic resources such as oil, as numerous US officials have admitted.
Religious belief also plays a part, of course, but stating that the West bears some responsibility is not mutually exclusive to the religion hypothesis. Characterising your opponents as “West-bashers” and “leftist apologists” is not the kind of discourse I would expect to see on a “freethought” blog.
This is not the sentiment I got from this piece. I don’t see anywhere even discussing the topic of whether the current destabilization in the region is due to the United States invading Iraq. The point is to knock down the argument that our iniquities are somehow responsible for brutal theologies–theologies that have been with sects of Islam for much longer than the United States has existed. It is an argument that religion can do no harm, an absurd argument on the face of it, for there are numerous brutal theocracies operating in the region that have not been destabilized by colonialism. If you familiarize yourself with Jerry’s other writings on the topic, you’ll see that he was not and is not today a proponent or apologist for the Iraq War.