Flew's wager

What does one make of a famed advocate of atheism, who debated CS Lewis in the 1950s and a patron saint for modern atheist groups like infidels.org, suddenly declaring himself a Deist at age 81?

A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-century has changed his mind. He now believes in God more or less based on scientific evidence, and says so on a video released Thursday.



At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England.



Flew said he's best labeled a deist like Thomas Jefferson, whose God was not actively involved in people's lives.

His later comment about the Christian and Muslim concept of God being akin to a "cosmic Saddam Hussein" suggests that he employs his dispassionate, Socratic assessment of evidence sparingly.



But what's more intriguing is to see him invoke belief buttressed by scientific evidence. As I've been wont to argue, proof denies faith. Not to say that a miracle on your doorstep wouldn't be valid empirical evidence, but rather that expecting to find conclusive rather than circumstantial evidence to rationally and rigorously deduce the existence of a Creator is misguided. Faith, by definition, lies outside the sphere of reason.



Still, the skeptic in me can't also help but wonder if his age doesn't have something to do with his tentative spirituality...



UPDATE: Richard Carrier of Infidels.org spoke to Flew personally about his apostasy, and reveals some more details:

I asked him point blank what he would mean if he ever asserted that "probably God exists," to which he responded (in a letter in his own hand, dated 19 October 2004):



I do not think I will ever make that assertion, precisely because any assertion which I am prepared to make about God would not be about a God in that sense ... I think we need here a fundamental distinction between the God of Aristotle or Spinoza and the Gods of the Christian and the Islamic Revelations.



Rather, he would only have in mind "the non-interfering God of the people called Deists--such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin." Indeed, he remains adamant that "theological propositions can neither be verified nor falsified by experience," exactly as he argued in "Theology and Falsification."

This is much more reassuring - I unintentionally mischaracterized his position based on the earlier article. Flew is arguing more for a remote "First cause" that does not neccessarily have a scientific explanation - Godelian, if you will.



Carrier also quotes the following from Flew:

My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species ... [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms.

Carrier suggests that the modern literature, which Flew has not yet read, provides the naturalistic theory that Flew asks for, and so ends his article on the confident note that Flew will re-embrace the faith once more - after a suitbale period of re-enlightenment.



Overall, the case here is not of a conversion on the road to Damascus but rather one of plugging holes - which his atheist brethren are keen to rapidly provide him brick and mortar.



On the issue of whether a naturalistic account of the first reproducing organizms is required to banish introduction of a supernatural element to the origins of life, I think it's a red herring. I am sure that Richard Carrier can make a rgorous case that a purely naturalistic explanation can exist. The more I have learned of biology, the less mystique that early pre-cellular life seems to me, frankly.



Where the true wonder of creation manifests is in the longer view, and the staggerring complexity - and evolution itself - of complex organisms.



I predict Flew will return to the fold in due order, finding in Carrier's literature the excuses he needs.



UPDATE: Well, I was careless and thought that the following aricle came after Flew's flirtation with Deism, but it is actually from some years beforehand. Still, it is interesting: "">Sorry to disappoint, but I'm Still an Atheist"

I remain still what I have been now for over fifty years, a negative atheist. By this I mean that I construe the initial letter in the word 'atheist' in the way in which everyone construes the same initial letter in such words as 'atypical' and 'amoral'. For I still believe that it is impossible either to verify or to falsify - to show to be false - what David Hume in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion happily described as "the religious hypothesis." The more I contemplate the eschatological teachings of Christianity and Islam the more I wish I could demonstrate their falsity.

[...]

I can suggest only one possible source of the rumours. Several weeks ago I submitted to the Editor of Philo (The Journal of the Society of Humanist Philosophers) a short paper making two points which might well disturb atheists of the more positive kind. The point more relevant here was that it can be entirely rational for believers and negative atheists to respond in quite different ways to the same scientific developments.

The gratuitous dig at Islam and Christianity aside (I think there's an element of a-priori opinion driving his supposedly dispassionate analyses), I find it fascinating that stressed the "negative" aspect of atheism. Logically, being unable to disprove God is logically equivalent to being unable to prove God - the latter being my position. He had indeed basically adopted the view that "God exists" is a Godelian statement, outside the realm of proof or falsification.



The other interesting point is his explicit agreement with my position that rationality is not uniform. I discussed this in an earlier essay that basically critiqued Richard Hoftstatder's "super-rational" argument (itself grounded in the game theory of the Prisoner's Dilemma). It is indeed perfectly valid for two rational thinkers to assess the same set of observations and facts and yet come to completely different conclusions.



To be honest, finding this much common ground with an atheist (negative or otherwise) is not that surprising to me. I'm fairly confident in the rigor of my own analyses, and you could in one sense characterize Flew's evolving position as a desperate attempt to NOT be atheist. desit, or anything else. I think they call these people "agnostics" in the real world. Perhaps my post title isn't as snarky as I thought...



Now, all of the above is moot of course, since he is now a declared Deist (of the "Aristotelian" type). I think I found more in common with him intelectually speaking when he was not a Deist. Much like my post, he seems to hae wandered all over :)



BTW, Flew's famous 1950 essay on Theology and Falsification is indeed required reading, regardless of where you stand on the line (or straddling it, as the case may be).

Internet haram!

via a lengthy isnad^[1], I've come across an article by Sikander Ziad Hashmi, a Canadian muslim who has is accorded sayyid status on the SunniForum.com website. He argues that blogging, and mixed-gender comment sections in particular, are not permissible according to Islamic principles. The key to his argument is:

In essence, blogging about one's personal life is similar to writing a journal entry and then posting it outside one's house or at a street corner for all to read. There isn't anything really wrong with doing that (if one wishes to be so public about one's private life), as long as one doesn't divulge any information that doesn't lead members of the opposite gender to envision and imagine the author, and doesn't let their hearts and minds become impressed and eventually lean towards the author.



Now, that may seem simple, but the fact is that nobody can really ascertain as to what may cause the above in the minds of the opposite gender. It may seem tempting to write-off this whole notion by saying that what goes through the minds of the readers is not the responsibility of the author. While that may hold true for truly objective pieces of work and in matters of true need, the onlookers would not be completely to blame for not "lowering their gaze" if a muscular, handsome man wearing boxers and a t-shirt were to unnecessarily walk through a group of women. The bulk of the blame would fall squarely on the shoulders of the one committing the unnecessary action, though the onlookers would be responsible for continuing to look even after they knew they weren't supposed to.



Similarly, bloggers must be careful about what they write, lest they divulge traits about themselves that they should otherwise not be making known to the opposite gender, while at the same time, leading the readers into sin by hooking them on to reading on and learning more about the things they really don't need to know, and shouldn't know. Some devoted readers even end up forming an affectionate, emotional attachment with the author.



The fact that the above is in fact possible has proven itself time and time again, with bloggers receiving marriage proposals and other suggestive comments through various means such as e-mail, the comments box on their blogs, etc. It is highly unlikely that a stranger would send off a marriage proposal unless he/she was able to get to know the author well enough to feel comfortable in taking such a step.

Now, let me first explicitly state that I have no problem with someone interpreting the faith to mean that something is permissible or not, and obviously he is not seeking to issue a fatwa or try to impose his view on others (though many at the Sunni Forum have already heeded his call to stop blogging entirely). As Ikram mentioned in Zack's (mixed-gender) comment section, you can take the argument on modesty arbitrarily far, to the point of sitting alone in a dark room 24/7 eating (homemade) bread. That's entirely a matter of personal interpretation.



Since I am clearly not imposing gender controls on my comment section nor have I deleted my blog, it will be no surprise to anyone that I disagree with Hashmi's interpretation^[2]. Zack has already criticized elements of his logic, but my main critique centers on the religious assumptions above, namely:

1. revelation of personality or physical details about yourself, even accidentally, is forbidden to members of the opposite sex, because this revelation will inevitably lead to sexual or emotional arousal



2. a person bears part of the blame for any sexual or emotional arousal they may stir in a member of the opposite sex

Hashmi is careful not to couch the argument solely in sexual terms, which legitimizes his arguments considerably. The key here is that he seeks to prevent the author from compromising their modesty and becoming an object of desire of infatuation. As I have argued in my essay on the Burke and the Bikini, that reduction to object status is something to guard against, regardless of whether it is done with too many or too few clothes. While I don't disagree with the intent behind assumption #1 above, his prescription is simply too broad.



If any contact that could lead to getting to know someone better (which would help in evaluation of marriage prospects) is forbidden, then how will anyone ever get to know anyone well enough to make that evaluation? There's a contradiction here that only resolves itself if you assume that marriage proposals should be the arranged type only and that personality is a secondary concern. Given the emphasis on "Biodata" in south asian matchmaking, this is perhaps not an unreasonable assumption in all cases, but that's a cultural issue, whereas Hashmi is trying to make a religious argument that presumably would apply even to non-biodata-obsessed cultures.



But the far more contentious assumption is that the author bears blame for "leading into sin" their readers of the opposite gender. Hashmi's thesis is that emotional attachments between people of different gender is inherently sinful unless that relationship is a mehram one. The subtext here is that people are ruled by their passions and are emotionally immature, hence not fully responsible for their actions. This is a pernicious concept which is at odds with the concept of individual liberties, because it forces society to adopt the role of protecting you from your own impulses - for your own good, of course. We know where this leads - to repressive regimes like the Taliban or imposition of evangelical Christian social norms into the legal domain.



Consider the classic case of the rape victim. She has a right to dress as she pleases; the rapists' argument that she had it coming because she wore a tight dress is not accepted as a valid defense in our society. At least, not anymore, thanks to the efforts of liberal groups like the ACLU and the entire civil rights struggle. The "blame the victim" mentality is a hallmark of the extremist social conservative who seeks to wield state power against individual liberty in order to force others to conform to their values. A crime like rape is seen as a problem arising from immodest clothing rather than a violation of civil rights and the sovereignity of the self.



Hashmi is correct that by revealing information about yourself, you may cause infatuation amongst a reader. Where he is incorrect is that such infatuation is your fault, for leading them to sin^[3]. Since I believe that the gift of reason (al-Aql al-insaan) from Allah is far more powerful (given its source) than the base instincts of our animal natures, it is hard to see what religious justification exists for the assertion that our animal natures can override reason, and hence our responsibility for our actions.



Still, Hashmi (and his followers at SunniForum) are welcome to their interpretation. I hope they do not fall to the easy temptation of judging the iman of those muslims such as myself who do not find their arguments rigorous enough to be binding.



I do have a question, though. Isn't participating in the SunniForum itself a violation of the same principles Hashmi outlines?



UPDATE: Here is a single-issue blog which makes the argument that chatting on MSN, AIM or equivalent is equivalent to zina (adultery). Aside from simply declaring it such, they do not provide any actual theologic references to justify the religious claim. This website is explicitly written as an attempt at dawah (proslytezation). The basic flaw in the argument is the assumption that any and all contact between non-mehram gender is inherently of immodest niyat (intent).





^[1] Sister Soljah -> Zack -> Bill -> me. OK, this footnote is a bit gratuitous, I was really looking for an excuse to use the word isnad in a blogging context.



^[2] Note that some muslims might interpret Hashmi's opinion as a fatwa and feel obligated to comply. Naturally, he's no authority as far as I am concerned, being a Bohra there is only one source of religious authority whose interpretations I would consider binding.



^[3] Whether the infatuation is a sin itself is largely irrelevant to the discussion.

Happy Hanukkah!

To all my Jewish friends in the blogsphere, especially Jonathan, Diane, and Matthew.



For the benefit of my readers who don't know what this holiday^[1] means beyond its commercial association with the generic Holiday season, here's a good summary from Wikipedia:

The miracle of Chanukah is referred to in the Talmud, but not in the books of the Maccabees. This holiday marks the defeat of Seleucid forces who had tried to prevent Israel from practising Judaism. Judah Maccabee and his brothers destroyed overwhelming forces, and rededicated the Temple. The eight-day festival is marked by the kindling of lights with a special Menorah, traditionally known amongst most Sephardim as a chanukah, and amongst many Balkan Sephardim and in Modern Hebrew as a chanukiah.



The Talmud (Shabbat 21b) says that after the occupiers had been driven from the Temple, the Maccabees went in to take down the pagan statues and restore the Temple. They discovered that most of the ritual items had been profaned. They sought ritually purified olive oil to light a Menorah to rededicate the Temple. However, they found only enough oil for a single day. They lit this, and went about purifying new oil. Miraculously, that tiny amount of oil burned for the eight days it took to have new oil pressed and made ready. It is for this reason that Jews light a candle each night of the festival.

The story of Hanukkah is fascinating to me because of the narrative about pagan desecration. Judaism is as strongly monotheistic as Islam (not that Christianity isn't monotheistic, but the other two faiths seem to place more emphasis on monotheism in their daily practices and observances, in my admittedly superficial observations). Therefore the struggle to resanctify pagan defilement of the single most important Temple seems strongly echoed in the Prophet's SAW cleansing of the Ka'aba, which was built by the grand patriarch of monotheism, Ibrahim Nabi (Abraham) and defiled by the pre-Islamic pagans (jahilliya). The Prophet SAW and his successor Ali AS cleaned out the Kaaba at the end of the (bloodless) conquest of Mecca, an event beautifully rendered at the end of the movie, The Message. I find a strong parallel between Hanukkah and the reclaiming of the Kaaba, as it's a theme that lies at the very heart of the concept of faith - an affirmation, and struggle, to assert Truth over falsehood.



This theme is also a parable for our times. The struggle against the "pagans" may not be about the numerical quantity of gods we follow, but rather about the universality of human liberty. If the day comes where constitutional liberalism^[2] spreads to every corner of the globe, then a memorial much like Hanukkah might be worth envisioning - one candle, for every century that mankind labored under tyranny and oppression.



^[1]I am tempted to use the spelling "Chanukkah" instead of Hanukkah, but am not sure what transliteration of the Hebrew word is more accurate since i have almost no experience in Hebrew pronounciation. With Arabic words like Qur'an, I do tend towards a stricter transliteration because I have knowledge of the difference in sound represented by the Qrather than the K, the presence of the apostrophe, etc. I fear it would be presumptous of me to write Chanukkah without the analogous knowledge of what pronounciation the spelling difference represents.

^[2]I have learned that freedom is not synonymous with democracy, and sometimes is even its enemy. The true measure of liberty is constitutional liberalism, not democracy for its own sake. This is a strongly Madisonian view, but after reading Fareed Zakaria's book, it's hard to dispute the evidence of history. More on this later.

Engage Iran

Here are the things I think I know about Iran.



Iran has a legitimate need for nuclear energy, because even though it has oil resources, it's not enough for true economic independence.



The Iranian regime at present sees acquiring nuclear weapons as a means of survival - an attitude that is not helped by the facts on the ground (see map, via Needlenose). The Iranian public is strongly nationalistic and sees nuclear weapons as a national point of pride, just as India and Pakistan did.



China and Iran are developing close economic ties. Iran will sell gas to China for 25 years. China will be allowed to develop oil resources in the Persian Gulf. The EU meanwhile is offering Iran a nice deal on economic incentives in return for a freeze on uranium enrichment.



A mock wargaming excercise sponsored by The Atlantic Monthly and run by some retired military and intelligence types concluded that Iran will likely develop nuclear weapons, and that a full-scale preventive invasion is not really feasible (even assuming no budget or resources allocated for post-war policing). Airstrikes by Israel analogous to the Osirak reactor bombing in Iraq are not going to work, the Iranian program is decentralized and underground.



That's what we know. So what should we do? Here's my take.



Iran is building economic ties to the EU and China - and the carrot of nuclear power is one we can wave to get on board and compete for that market. The only reason the mullahs are likely to pursue nuclear power is because of perceived threat from America - but if we become an economic partner (and compete with China and the EU) then the incentive for nukes lessens.



Despite boilerplate mullah rhetoric, I don't think that a nuclear Iran would be suicidal enough to attack Israel. Mutually assured destruction, after all. Why would the Iranian regime be so interested in long-term economic alliances if they were really intent on all-out armageddon? I wouldn't be surprised if Iran simply copies Israel's own "strategic denial" policy on nuke capabilities.



I think that N. Korea is the country that we must stop at all costs from acdquiring nukes, because it's far more unstable (and irrational) leadership.



The best thing that can happen is for Iran to succeed in building economic ties to the West. That will lead to a middle class, increase in per-capita GDP, and quality of life. The mullahcracy will stay in power but be forced to incrementally liberalize, in much the same way that China is doing. In many ways the analogy is a close one between the two, and their close relationship only underscores the likelihood that the mullahs will see economic liberalization as the key to maintaing power without descending into North Korea-esque disaster. The Iranian theocracy is much more reality-based, and the enormous youth population virtually guarantees that some accomodation has to be made on their part.



In other words, we should at the very least do nothing. At the very most, we should actively engage Iran with trade (there's a huge population of youth there hungry for our blue jeans and sneakers!), hold Iran accountable to its promises and IAEA oversight (already much more stringent than anything Iraq agreed to), and help Iran with its energy crisis (as Kerry proposed during the campaign). And of course, military containment of Iran should continue - though with a non-threatening posture, so that the nuke incentive remains low.



Iran, like China, is a civilization in its own right - and liberal freedom is likely going to precede democracy there. Unless we intervene militarily as we did in Iraq.



ADDENDUM. Note that Kenneth Pollack's new book on Iran makes much the same general recommendations (though in a more roundabout way). Praktike summarizes Pollack's prescription as follows: 1. Hold Open the Prospect of the Grand Bargain, 2. A True Carrot-and-Stick Approach, and 3. Preparing for a New Containment Regime.

The story of Fallujah is yet to be written

Without question, the military offensive into Fallujah had a cost in innocent human life. That is a genuine tragedy and a genuine burden of conscience that all Americans must bear. However, I believe with genuine conviction that the Fallujah offensive was the lesser of two evils.



Some of the civilian refugees from Falluja are beginning to tell their stories, and the media coverage does not seek to minimize the terror that they experienced caught between the fighting. For example, aBoston Globe article begins with the face of innocence - a girl wounded in the fighting. I see my own daughter's face in hers. The article also describes how civilians had mostly fled the city, but one journalist embedded with the Marines stumbled inside a house to find a woman huddled in fear with her children as bombs exploded outside.



However, these refugees have been finding that the role of saviour and oppressor have not been as black and white as they were led to believe. Here's another anecdote from the Globe article:

Salehma Mahmoud, 43, and her four daughters fled Fallujah on Tuesday after her husband was killed fighting against the Americans. They walked 4 miles only to be confronted by Iraqi soldiers who insulted and harassed them, grabbing at Mahmoud's oldest daughter.



"He grabbed Fatima's hand and tried to kiss her. I was trying to stop him with all I had," she said. "He beat me and pushed me to the ground, and his friends were laughing at us loud. He tore the right sleeve of my daughter's dress and lay her on the ground."



To Mahmoud's surprise -- because she had been told that US troops would beat and rape her -- a US patrol rescued them. An American soldier pulled the Iraqi soldier away and yelled at him.



Mahmoud's daughter, who speaks some English, told her that the American called the Iraqi names and said, "If you had really come to save the people of this city, you would not have done such a thing."

The reality of life in Fallujah was not an idyllic paradise, free from Amereican oppression. It's clear from reports like this from the Times of London that the girl in the photo may now have a more positive future, despite her present pain:

Mutilated bodies dumped on Fallujah's bombed out streets today painted a harrowing picture of eight months of rebel rule.



As US and Iraqi troops mopped up the last vestiges of resistance in the city after a week of bombardment and fighting, residents who stayed on through last week's offensive were emerging and telling harrowing tales of the brutality they endured.



Flyposters still litter the walls bearing all manner of decrees from insurgent commanders, to be heeded on pain of death.

[...]

Another poster in the ruins of the souk bears testament to the strict brand of Sunni Islam imposed by the council, fronted by hardline cleric Abdullah Junabi. The decree warns all women that they must cover up from head to toe outdoors, or face execution by the armed militants who controlled the streets.



Two female bodies found yesterday suggest such threats were far from idle. An Arab woman, in a violet nightdress, lay in a post-mortem embrace with a male corpse in the middle of the street. Both bodies had died from bullets to the head.

For individual liberty to truly take root in Iraq, the tyranny of extremists over the civilians of Iraq must end. Such liberation cannot occur without cost. I am a classical liberal when it comes to human liberty - and Thomas Jefferson's legendary dictum "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure" is an expression of pragmatic principle, not vacant idealism, so neccessary to success in the endeavour at hand.



The girl in the photo above is a patriot of Iraq. Margaret Hassan (see sidebar) is a martyr of Iraq. Both patriots and martyrs cannot be in short supply if Iraq is to become free.

Margaret Hassan's murder by foreign insurgents, widely denounced by the Iraqi people, inspires moral clarity in the Arab News, commenting, "Humanity, Islam and brotherhood � the appeal fell on deaf ears." However, for Robert Fisk, the question of who murdered her remains unanswered. Fisk, unlike the Arab News writer, cannot conceive that evil plays a role in this conflict, firmly in denial that those who oppose marauding American myrmidons might not be pure of motive.



The truth is, however, that this evil predates Islam, it is the evil against which Islam itself was founded to fight against and against which we must all (muslim or otherwise) maintain vigilant jihad.

I am honest enough to admit that my support for these policies means I share the burdden of blame for the sufferring of innocents. But those who repeatedly reserve their concern for civilian Iraqis until only after American operations begin have far worse crises of conscience than I to face in the mirror.



ADDENDUM. Juan Cole, no friend to the Bush Administration or booster of the Iraq War, comments with crystal moral clarity:

the Marines at Fallujah are operating in accordance with a UNSC Resolution and have all the legitimacy in international law that flows from that. The Allawi government asked them to undertake this Fallujah mission.



To compare them to the murderous thugs who kidnapped CARE worker Margaret Hassan, held her hostage, terrified her, and then killed her is frankly monstrous. The multinational forces are soldiers fighting a war in which they are targetting combatants and sometimes accidentally killing innocents. The hostage-takers are terrorists deliberately killing innocents. It is simply not the same thing...



...the basic idea of attacking the guerrillas holding up in that city is not in and of itself criminal or irresponsible. A significant proportion of the absolutely horrible car bombings that have killed hundreds and thousands of innocent Iraqis, especially Shiites, were planned and executed from Fallujah. There were serious and heavily armed forces in Fallujah planning out ways of killing hundreds to prevent elections from being held in January. These are mass murderers, serial murderers. If they were fighting only to defend Fallujah, that would be one thing; even the Marines would respect them for that. They aren't, or at least, a significant proportion of them aren't. They are killing civilians elsewhere in order to throw Iraq into chaos and avoid the enfranchisement of the Kurds and Shiites.

Those who seek to equate the mission of the Marines who liberated Fallujah and the Islamist thugs who tyrannized the city and all of Iraq beyond, are the same ones who breathlessly invoke the Lancet study purporting 100,000 civilian deaths because of the US occupation, having been utterly silent during the genocide against the Shi'a during Saddam's rule. To them, I have nothing to say. Their agenda is quite clear, and it has nothing to do with true compassion for the citizens of Iraq.

get Firefox! surf, don't suffer, the web

I was a bit puzzled by some of the feedback I've been getting on the site layout from people, until I realized that this pure-CSS layout likely looks a bit broken in Internet Explorer. IE is notorious for making Bad Decisions when it comes to rendering valid HTML and CSS. It pains me to know that my lovely layout is being mangled, so I'm going to repeat my call to all to switch to Firefox v1.0. Try it, its simple to switch and you'll literally rediscover the web.



Need convincing? In Firefox, you have a built-in and extensible search function that lets you easily query Amazon, Google, EBay, IMDB, whatever you want. It has much more sophisticated pop-up blockeres and cookie management. It protects you from web-borne viruses that exploit holes and flaws in IE. And wait until you discover tabbed browsing! You have to try this.



And last but not least, start appreciating City of Brass the way it was meant to be seen!

Islam and Freedom

I've argued many times before (with examples) that Islam is actually the mechanism through which liberty can be brought to the Arab world, and the false-dichotomy of the "Clash of Civilizations" worldview articulated by Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington. The Clash hypothesis is what animates foreign policy in the Bush Administration, and its defenders are forced to resort to condescension towards Islam and Arab culture to make their case.



Michael Hersh now has a detailed essay on Bernard Lewis and his influence upon policy, especially his persona grata status with Vice President Cheney (who sits like Shelob at the nexus of all policy decisions in the Administration). The following lengthy excerpt is the key to understanding the alternative school of thought to which I also subscribe (which you could call "muscular Wilsonianism"):

At least until the Iraq war, most present-day Arabs didn't think in the stark clash-of-civilization terms Lewis prefers. Bin Laden likes to vilify Western Crusaders, but until relatively recently, he was still seen by much of the Arab establishment as a marginal figure. To most Arabs before 9/11, the Crusades were history as ancient as they are to us in the West. Modern Arab anger and frustration is, in fact, less than a hundred years old. As bin Laden knows very well, this anger is a function not of Islam's humiliation at the Treaty of Carlowitz of 1699�the sort of long-ago defeat that Lewis highlights in his bestselling What Went Wrong�but of much more recent developments. These include the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement by which the British and French agreed to divvy up the Arabic-speaking countries after World War I; the subsequent creation, by the Europeans, of corrupt, kleptocratic tyrannies in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan; the endemic poverty and underdevelopment that resulted for most of the 20th century; the U.N.-imposed creation of Israel in 1948; and finally, in recent decades, American support for the bleak status quo.



Yet as Bulliet writes, over the longer reach of history, Islam and the West have been far more culturally integrated than most people realized; there is a far better case for "Islamo-Christian civilization" than there is for the clash of civilizations. "There are two narratives here," says Fawaz Gerges, an intellectual ally of Bulliet's at Sarah Lawrence University. "One is Bernard Lewis. But the other narrative is that in historical terms, there have been so many inter-alliances between world of Islam and the West. There has never been a Muslim umma, or community, except for 23 years during the time of Mohammed. Except in the theoretical minds of the jihadists, the Muslim world was always split. Many Muslim leaders even allied themselves with the Crusaders."



Today, progress in the Arab world will not come by secularizing it from above (Bulliet's chapter dealing with Chalabi is called �Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places�) but by rediscovering this more tolerant Islam, which actually predates radicalism and, contra Ataturk, is an ineluctable part of Arab self-identity that must be accommodated. For centuries, Bulliet argues, comparative stability prevailed in the Islamic world not (as Lewis maintains) because of the Ottomans' success, but because Islam was playing its traditional role of constraining tyranny. "The collectivity of religious scholars acted at least theoretically as a countervailing force against tyranny. You had the implicit notion that if Islam is pushed out of the public sphere, tyranny will increase, and if that happens, people will look to Islam to redress the tyranny." This began to play out during the period that Lewis hails as the modernization era of the 19th century, when Western legal structures and armies were created. "What Lewis never talks about is the concomitant removal of Islam from the center of public life, the devalidation of Islamic education and Islamic law, the marginalization of Islamic scholars," Bulliet told me. Instead of modernization, what ensued was what Muslim clerics had long feared, tyranny that conforms precisely with some theories of Islamic political development, notes Bulliet. What the Arab world should have seen was "not an increase in modernization so much as an increase in tyranny. By the 1960s, that prophecy was fulfilled. You had dictatorships in most of the Islamic world." Egypt's Gamel Nasser, Syria's Hafez Assad, and others came in the guise of Arab nationalists, but they were nothing more than tyrants.



Yet there was no longer a legitimate force to oppose this trend. In the place of traditional Islamic learning�which had once allowed, even encouraged, science and advancement�there was nothing. The old religious authorities had been hounded out of public life, back into the mosque. The Caliphate was dead; when Ataturk destroyed it in Turkey, he also removed it from the rest of the Islamic world. Into that vacuum roared a fundamentalist reaction led by brilliant but aberrant amateurs like Egypt's Sayyid Qutb, the founding philosopher of Ayman Zawahiri's brand of Islamic radicalism who was hanged by al-Nasser, and later, Osama bin Laden, who grew up infected by the Saudis' extreme version of Wahhabism. Even the creator of Wahhabism, the 18th-century thinker Mohammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, was outside the mainstream, notorious for vandalizing shrines and "denounced" by theologians across the Islamic world in his time for his "doctrinal mediocrity and illegitimacy," as the scholar Abdelwahab Meddeb writes in another new book that rebuts Lewis, Islam and its Discontents.^[1]

Now, I've been making my way through Fareed Zakaria's book The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, and I've found that it's very much in tune with the perspective above. Zakaria makes the essential point that the rise of teh Catholic Church was really the catalyst for freedom in Europe, even though the Church itself was often not liberal at all. As Bill Allison has been saying for some time now, the Reformation was not a "progressive" vision of faith, if anything Luther sought a return to more strict orthodoxy. Zakaria calls this the Paradox of Catholicism and it's a topic on which I will blog more in the near future.



The bottom line here is that the goal is a liberal democracy - and that liberal freedoms often (in fact, nearly always) precede democracy. The absence of Islam from the public sphere has meant a lack of a counter-balancing check upon the power of the state in the Arab world - and into that void has rushed extremist ideology that ultimately enters symbiosis with the state itself. Nowhere is this more true than in Saudi Arabia.



The urgency of this debate centers on Iran. The neocon position is that we must invade to liberate. But if you see Islam as an ally, then there is a way to play catalyst to internal liberalization. That will lead to a far more stable sprig of liberty than one imposed (as the Iraq example shows).



The Future of Freedom is a compelling book and together with Gary Hart's The Fourth Power essentially is the foundation of my foreign policy views. The present neoconservative view in charge of policy, however, is unable to recognize that Islam is the key, not the obstacle.

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^[1] The book Islam and its Discontents is not yet on Amazon, but you can read an excerpt from the book online.