Obama’s “Muslim Advisor” calls "the Turkish Khomeini" an "inspiration" II

Since verbatim repetition is the order of the day:

let us summarize again what this so-called discussion is about:

1) an analyst/researcher in Muslim studies was recently appointed to advise Obama on faith-based partnerships for the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, created by George W. Bush in 2001, an organization which was previously exploited to funnel millions of dollars to religious supporters of the Bush administration. (Which, of course, doesn't cause many here to blink an eye.) The goal of the Office is apparently to provide social services through faith-based organizations to local communities. The researcher recently praised a similar and apparently effective social program undertaken by a Turkish Muslim group.

a) There are suspicions that the leader of the social movement, through his strain of Islamic teachings, wishes to reintroduce Islamic values into largely secular Turkey. b) On being confronted with this association, the advisor claimed she has seen no evidence for these suspicions.

2) The news article, and Oakes' posting, however, do not take this non-news event at face value. They also insinuate that i) Obama has an advisor on all things Islamic; ii) the advisor, and by extension, the "administration" (/Obama) frequently associate with/ admire Islamic teachers/leaders; iii) they don't care that these associations might be dubious and iv) though the advisor appears to be moderate or liberal, she may not be so because v) of these associations and because vi) Muslim culture itself is not generally moderate or liberal. By implication, vii) the administration itself may be showing some preference for radical Islam.

3) Apart from these insinuations, there are the sweeping, insulting statements and implications about 1 billion people - that they are incapable of thinking for themselves, that Islamic culture is in itself dangerous (which I don't entirely disagree with, except I think it is not necessarily more dangerous than a culture which gives rise to abortion-doctor killers and bloodthirsty politicians funded by religious groups), and that any kind of association with Islam - since it is currently, frequently associated in the popular mind with terrorism and repression - may lead to something dangerous, something threatening the stability and security of millions of people, those well-meaning, family-loving statistically average people that we all know, some of them prolific posters on internet forums who consider themselves pundits.

In the end, all these "facts" add up to a whole lot of nothing. As "facts", they are quite irrelevant. As pseudo-intellectual "analysis" and as controversy, of course, they are very substantial material. Hence, they appeal greatly to a crowd that delights in, essentially, gossip.

This saves me so much trouble. I think next time another idiotic discussion commences, I'll just cut and paste from the panoply of previous posts on exactly the same topics.

Oh, another appropriate comment lifted from "that other thread" (you know, the one in which my attempt at argument was dissed completely so I had to run and hide on a new thread and repeat myself without bothering to reply to a single comment ruining my little parade):

As with all these debates that are more about group psychology than the alleged topic at hand, there are {other factors} at work: ... the assumption, by some, that a discussion based on these mounds of superficial knowledge actually lead to "serious" conclusions on "serious" issues that "affect us all" , without any direct experience or substantially verifiable knowledge of the affairs at hand.

Excerpts from From Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/the_parano...

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics., In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
 Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent….

a Texas newspaper article of 1855:
“…It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism.…The Pope has recently sent his ambassador of state to this country on a secret commission, the effect of which is an extraordinary boldness of the Catholic church throughout the United States.…These minions of the Pope are boldly insulting our Senators; reprimanding our Statesmen; propagating the adulterous union of Church and State; abusing with foul calumny all governments but Catholic, and spewing out the bitterest execrations on all Protestantism. The Catholics in the United States receive from abroad more than $200,000 annually for the propagation of their creed. Add to this the vast revenues collected here.…”
These quotations give the keynote of the style….

The Jesuit Threat

Fear of a Masonic plot had hardly been quieted when the rumors arose of a Catholic plot against American values. One meets here again the same frame of mind, but a different villain. The anti-Catholic movement converged with a growing nativism, and while they were not identical, together they cut such a wide swath in American life that they were bound to embrace many moderates to whom the paranoid style, in its full glory, did not appeal. Moreover, we need not dismiss out of hand as totally parochial or mean-spirited the desire of Yankee Americans to maintain an ethnically and religiously homogeneous society nor the particular Protestant commitments to individualism and freedom that were brought into play. But the movement had a large paranoid infusion, and the most influential anti-Catholic militants certainly had a strong affinity for the paranoid style.
 Two books which appeared in 1835 described the new danger to the ?American way of life and may be taken as expressions of the anti-Catholic mentality. One, Foreign Conspiracies against the Liberties of the United States, was from the hand of the celebrated painter and inventor of the telegraph, S.F.B. Morse. “A conspiracy exists,” Morse proclaimed , and “its plans are already in operation…we are attacked in a vulnerable quarter which cannot be defended by our ships, our forts, or our armies.” The main source of the conspiracy Morse found in Metternich’s government: “Austria is now acting in this country. She has devised a grand scheme. She has organized a great plan for doing something here.…She has her Jesuit missionaries traveling through the land; she has supplied them with money, and has furnished a fountain for a regular supply.” Were the plot successful, Morse said, some scion of the House of Hapsburg would soon be installed as Emperor of the United States.
“It is an ascertained fact,” wrote another Protestant militant,
“that Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery. A minister of the Gospel from Ohio has informed us that he discovered one carrying on his devices in his congregation; and he says that the western country swarms with them under the name of puppet show men, dancing masters, music teachers, peddlers of images and ornaments, barrel organ players, and similar practitioners.”
Lyman Beecher, the elder of a famous family and the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote in the same year his Plea for the West, in which he considered the possibility that the Christian millennium might come in the American states. Everything depended, in his judgment, upon what influences dominated the great West, where the future of the country lay. There Protestantism was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with Catholicism. “Whatever we do, it must be done quickly.…” A great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, was sweeping in upon the country, subsidized and sent by “the potentates of Europe,” multiplying tumult and violence, filling jails, crowding poorhouses, quadrupling taxation, and sending increasing thousands of voters to “lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our power.”…

Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan. Whereas the anti-Masons had envisaged drinking bouts and had entertained themselves with sado-masochistic fantasies about the actual enforcement of grisly Masonic oaths,* the anti-Catholics invented an immense lore about libertine priests, the confessional as an opportunity for seduction, licentious convents and monasteries. Probably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a work supposedly written by one Maria Monk, entitled Awful Disclosures, which appeared in 1836. The author, who purported to have escaped from the Hotel Dieu nunnery in Montreal after five years there as novice and nun, reported her convent life in elaborate and circumstantial detail. She reported having been told by the Mother Superior that she must “obey the priests in all things”; to her “utter astonishment and horror,” she soon found what the nature of such obedience was. Infants born of convent liaisons were baptized and then killed, she said, so that they might ascend at once to heaven. Her book, hotly attacked and defended , continued to be read and believed even after her mother gave testimony that Maria had been somewhat addled ever since childhood after she had rammed a pencil into her head. Maria died in prison in 1849, after having been arrested in a brothel as a pickpocket.
 Anti-Catholicism, like anti-Masonry, mixed its fortunes with American party politics, and it became an enduring factor in American politics. The American Protective Association of the 1890s revived it with ideological variations more suitable to the times—the depression of 1893, for example, was alleged to be an international creation of the Catholics who began it by starting a run on the banks. Some spokesmen of the movement circulated a bogus encyclical attributed to Leo XIII instructing American Catholics on a certain date in 1893 to exterminate all heretics, and a great many anti-Catholics daily expected a nationwide uprising. The myth of an impending Catholic war of mutilation and extermination of heretics persisted into the twentieth century….

Why They Feel Dispossessed

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.
 Important changes may also be traced to the effects of the mass media. The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public; the literature of the paranoid style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in personal description and personal invective. For the vaguely delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal delegates of the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of the monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower….

Emulating the Enemy

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)
 As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.
 The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).
 It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy.* Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth….

Renegades and Pedants

A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates :evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.
 Paranoid writing begins with certain broad defensible judgments. There was something to be said for the anti-Masons. After all, a secret society composed of influential men bound by special obligations could conceivable pose some kind of threat to the civil order in which they were suspended. There was also something to be said for the Protestant principles of individuality and freedom, as well as for the nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization. Again, in our time an actual laxity in security allowed some Communists to find a place in governmental circles, and innumerable decisions of World War II and the Cold War could be faulted.
 The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies. Sometimes the right-wing striving for scholarly depth and an inclusive world view has startling consequences: Mr. Welch, for example, has charged that the popularity of Arnold Toynbee’s historical work is the consequence of a plot on the part of Fabians, “Labour party bosses in England,” and various members of the Anglo-American “liberal establishment” to overshadow the much more truthful and illuminating work of Oswald Spengler.

I read in the latest First Things that some time within the last year or two, the "middle class" (which can be defined in different ways, but one definition that seems as good as any is, "having more than a third of your income available for non-necessities") is now a majority in the world.

This fact, more than anything else, more than any verse in the Bible or Koran or Capital or any other holy book, tells us the direction in which our species is going.

Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, atheist ... people want color TV and rock 'n' roll and microwave ovens and paved roads. The process of supplying these things makes a new man.

The process is slow, uneven, bumpy and for every two steps forward there is a step back.

Modernity has lots of ugly sides. People want color TV, but a lot of them don't want their children watching pornography on it. They feel uneasy about seeing their tribal identities dissolving into a world of self-interested individuals, and they are not wrong to feel that way.

So, among other things, they adhere to familiar, traditionalist religious groups. Although I am an atheist, I have a lot of sympathy for these people, whether they be Christians or Muslims. So long as they aren't trying to cut my head off, or the heads of people like me, I can be patient.

In the Muslim world, we are going to see a thousand varieties of "Islamism", and they will overlap, and change, and evince contradictory aspects. The Puritans who dished the British monarchy and established religious liberty in England were not tolerant liberal-minded Enlightenment philosophers.

As democracy comes to the Muslim world, we must expect there to be political movements, and figures, who are not perfect liberal democrats, but who are not exterminating theocrats either. Of course they are going to express opinions and beliefs which are at odds with Western views. As the middle class grows, as the level of education increases, as the world knits more closely together via modern technology, so will these forces become more congenial to liberal democrats, although not without, no doubt, set backs and diversions along the way.

The worst thing that believers in liberal democracy and the rule of law could do would be seen to be saying, better a corrupt dictator in our pocket, than a democratically-supported government which is inspired by Islam.

#9 A very timely and pertinent post.

#10 Although I agree with the general direction of Doug's post, a couple of (perhaps minor, perhaps not) differences must be underscored.

1) The idea of a so-called "Muslim world" is valid only to the same extent that there is such a thing as a "Western world" or "Hispanic world"; i.e., generalizations, while arguably valid and acceptable, must be taken with a grain of salt. A hypothetical sentence like "Iberian and Latin American cultures have been prone to dictatorships because Hispanic people do not inherently value democracy" is, needless to say - at the very least - problematic. One of the many issues with the original posts in this thread is that they hinge entirely on such crude, flimsy abstractions.

2) Democracy does exist - or, in specific cases, has existed or was being experimented with - in many parts of this so-called Muslim world. And in some of those specific cases, it was the Anglo-American West that played a decisive role in snatching it away from them. Painting this so-called Muslim world as a resistant, slowly-evolving group edging towards modernity is, among other things, condescending and inaccurate, even if it is a popular romantic trope among journalists and internet-based political analysts; as an example, the same could be said of many areas of the world - including and especially the US - so it is not particularly meaningful.

What? You really didn't think I would be able to find this thread? :)

*

If I may be so bold, I would like to recommend, particularly to those who seem to have some preconceived or self-serving notion of a radicalized Muslim World, a film from Iran called "The Willow Tree".

Now, it's an interesting film, a wee bit on the melodramatic side (a blind man regains his sight). I recommend this particular one only because it's the most recent I've seen. Still, in the background, one can catch glimpses of Iran and Iranian society. And what do we see? People like you and me, going about their lives, with personal inner conflicts, with loving regard for others, with subleties of thought and emotion, committing petty criminal acts, caring for the blind.

What we don't see are wild-eyed fanatics, rising every day with an obsessive desire for the destruction of the Western World. They don't crouch in the dust, next to a camel, all beard and dusty turban. Yes, the women wore the hijab on the street, but after a moment or two, it becomes invisible. The protagonist read Rumi, but in a University setting. The classroom is co-ed. The people portrayed are what we would call upper-middle class.
We do not see a society hell-bent on martyrdom, burning with hatred.

There is normalcy in the Muslim world, that is to say, it exists. There is devotion without radicalism. There are department stores with large screen televisions, public transit, gardens, snow, and children. There are also a lot of problems, and there is a need for change, which, hopefully will come over time (see post #10). On our (western) part, there is no need for misrepresentation and innuendo.

Every society has its zealots, fanatics, and self-appointed purifiers. Last week I started a thread in Pro/Con called "...like a cancer." It was a big disappointment that no one seemed to get the gist of the OP. But, what can you do? Move forward, move ahead.

Given the level of vitriol here, I imagine I'll regret asking, but oakesspalding, what, exactly, is your question(s)? (Or were you just putting ideas out there in general, without questions?) I've listened to about half of the Fora video, and so far all I am hearing is a civil discussion among Manji, Mogahed and the Jewish moderator guy. I don't hear the women screaming or pronouncing takfir on each other or punching the moderator or anything.

Is the question "Why don't Manji and Mogahed agree 100%?" If so, then that seems pretty simple: Why should they? Christians don't. Indeed, they argue vociferously, even violently, among themselves. Across sectarian, racial and class lines, but even within such lines. So if two Muslim women don't agree on all things, I'd say that's pretty par for the course and not very shocking, no?

Is the question, "Why aren't Muslims rushing to embrace Irshad Manji?" If so, the answer seems pretty simple: Why would they? When liberal, openly gay/lesbian Christians, for example, push for reform and scriptural re-interpretation, they are not necessarily greeted with open arms and embraced as "leaders of change" by their fellow Christians, even ones within the same sect. Look at the Anglican uproar, for instance. Manji's cool and is an engaging speaker, but she's Canadian, liberal, and lesbian. She's simply not going to resonate with all 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. Probably the majority, especially outside of the West, haven't even heard of her.

Is the question, "Why does Dalia Mogahed like or approve of Fethullah Gülen and/or the Gülen movement?" If so, I don't have an answer for that; perhaps it's contained in the video and I just haven't gotten to that part yet. However, you phrased your question as "Why does Dalia Mogahed support the 'Turkish Khoemini'?", so perhaps the more relevant question should be, "What does Dalia Mogahed think and believe about Gülen? Does she actually see him and approve of him as 'the Turkish Khomeini'? Or does she just think he's a nice guy who's out there funding schools for kids and speaking against violence and promoting Islam, and such?"

I myself only know the basics of Gülen and the Gülen movement (and that mostly by reading what it says about itself and listening to interviews with American non-Muslims who traveled to Turkey on a Gülen-sponsored homestay-type program). As an agnostic atheist, I certainly disagree with Gülen's views on atheism; and I think he's way off-base about biological evolution.

However, Gülen's views about atheism are shared, as I recall, by Pope Benedict XVI among many others, who has commented on the "dangers of secularism and atheism" and whatnot; Gülen's views about evolution are shared by a number of Christians in this country (U.S.); and his idea of getting more of his people/views into the system via local elections and such, are no different from many groups in the U.S., including conservative Christians, atheist/agnostic/secular people, and people in the Libertarian party. Everybody wants their piece of the pie, right here, right now, just like in the song.

So ... well ... What was the question(s) again?

A private message for Essa:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v60-qRvmzKA

15> Just when I've finally driven that "Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Robin" lyric out of my head, now this :(

>14 oakes:: But if you reprint your post there, I'd love to answer you.

Robert Bankoff's 1993 New Yorker cartoon:

“No, Thursday’s out. How about never—is never good for you?”

>Pro and Con isn't exactly friendly at the moment to civility or tolerance.

Yes, when the next occasion pops up, we should all pitch in and get our heckled posters something appropriate to heal all the wounds.

Keep the faith. Show the love.

Oh, I'm done with it. 'Twas fun while it lasted, but the idea of our friend moving from thread to thread, a will 'o the wisp, a latter-day Flying Dutchman is passing strange. Passing strange indeed.

Peace to you on your journeys. Flights of angels, and all that...

19: Good job, You are certainly raising the level of discourse around here.

(Note the sarcasm).

I have to keep busy while I wait for you to back this up:

The facts contained in the post are all true, and the conclusions drawn, while probably not entirely warranted, are neither overly dramatic or wildly overblown.

By the way, if you can find the time to reply, why not also reply to this question:

since there are no credible facts, statements or conclusions in either the article or the posting about it, I will ... assume there is still some elusive "substance" to this discussion. I just want to know what it is - can it be pointed out ... ?

Oi, I give up. Whenever I read this thread and I keep thinking of this this. :D

Oakesspalding, I don't post much in Political Conservatives but if you (or anybody else, I guess, for that matter) want to repost my post #13 into the thread and answer it there, that's fine; feel free to do so. I will not respond for at least awhile, as I am heading out for a weekend whose activities will probably include not logging into LibraryThing. :)