Talking Point Number Three: Islamophobia

As long as I could remember, my mother dreamed of visiting Greece. While celebrating Christmas Eve 1994 at my parents' home shortly after her retirement, I opened a small package with my name on it under the tree. Inside was a ticket for an Aegean Cruise which was to be spent with my parents. Already in my thirties, I was between relationships and feeling particularly alone at the time, so it was the perfect moment for such a trip. "Maybe you'll meet someone" my mother suggested.

The trip took place in spring of the following year. It began in Athens, a city fascinating for its antiquities, less so for its more contemporary aspects. We spent a few days there before embarking on the cruise. It so happened there was a strike of dock workers at the port of Piraeus where we were scheduled to board the ship, aptly named the Marco Polo. That strike proved fortunate as the travel company arranged for us to meet up with the ship farther down the coast enabling us to visit more of mainland Greece including the ruins of the city of Corinth whose first century Church was the recipient of a series of letters from Saint Paul which would become part of the New Testament. 

Close by we boarded the ship which took us first to the picture postcard islands of Mykonos (famous for its windmills) and Santorini, before sailing to more substantial places, first south to Heraklion, the capital of Crete. There we visited the most ancient site of our trip, the Bronze Age Palace of Knossos, center of the ancient Minoan Civilization. From there we sailed east to the island of Rhodes where my mom and I took an excursion to the city of Lindos, featuring its own city in the air (Acropolis), its magnificence in my estimation anyway, eclipsing the more famous one in Athens. 

The following day was spent entirely at sea with a sail-by (if there is such a term) of the island of Patmos where legend has it, the Apostle John wrote the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible. 

Had our trip ended there, it would have been a smashing success. But in retrospect it was just getting started. We were headed for Turkey.

One of our stops on the western coast of Turkey was the city of Çanakkale, strategically located at the entrance to the Dardanelles (also known as the Straight of Gallipoli for you WWI buffs), the narrow inlet that connects the Aegean to the Sea of Marmara, then via the Bosporus which bisects the city of Istanbul, the Black Sea. About one half hour from Çanakkale sit the ruins of the ancient city of Troy. 

With that visit in mind, to get into the spirit of the trip, I bought along a copy of the Odyssey to read during our time at sea. As is often the fate of good intentions however, there were far too many distractions to seriously consider Homer's epic poem: attending to my father's fragile health, the result of his over-exposure to the Aegean sun, thoughts of my own sad state of affairs back home, and perhaps most of all the female members of the ship's staff, sunbathing topless on the top deck of the ship. 

My own twentieth century Odyssey, complete with the semi-naked sirens, ended up in Istanbul, the most breath-takingly beautiful, exhilarating, fascinating, complicated, exhausting, frustrating and magnificent place I've ever visited.

But that's a story for another day and besides, I'm way off track of the subject at hand.

I bring this up because of all the great experiences of our trip, there is one thing that has stuck in my head perhaps more than anything else with the exception of our time in Istanbul. It was a comment made by our tour guide in Kuşadası, Turkey en route to the location of another place that plays a key role in the history of Christianity, the city of Ephesus. Our guide was a Turk about my age who in addition to his engaging personality and encyclopedic knowledge of the material he presented to us, had a great command of colloquial English. As this was our first port-of-call in Turkey he took it upon himself to introduce us to the Turkish nation, its culture, its history (selected parts of it anyway), its language, and the predominant religion of its people, Islam. Then he made the comment I will always remember. He said emphatically:

"We are Turks, NOT Arabs."

That little tidbit was not news to me nor I'm guessing was it news to most of our fellow travelers, although I could be wrong. We Americans, who constituted the majority of our group, have a deserved reputation for being remarkably ignorant of the world outside our borders, as has been made quite obvious since the events of this past October 7, and I'm sure our guide was aware of that.

Of course, I can't read his mind nearly thirty years after the fact, but by the way he made that comment, not as an aside but rather as a talking point, I couldn't help but think what he was really saying to us was this:

"We are not terrorists."

For a little context, remember this was 1995, a little more than six years before the mother-of-all terrorist attacks that took place on September 11, 2001. By 1995, acts of terrorism were commonplace all around the world and their perpetrators were a varied lot with a diverse set of axes to grind. The terms jihad, al-Qaeda and Islamophobia were not yet household words in the non-Muslim world in 1995 and international terrorism was far from the exclusive domain of Arab-Islamic extremists, as it remains today.

Yet they were up there.

Shortly before our trip, the deadliest act of terrorism (at the time) on American soil, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building happened in Oklahoma City. 168 people lost their lives and hundreds more were injured. I distinctly remember early speculation on who were the perps. Al-Qaeda, who had already committed several acts of terrorism directed at Americans overseas was high on the list. Of course that was wrong, the barbarous act in Oklahoma was committed by home grown American ultra-right-wing extremist terrorists.

In my last post I mentioned that there is a problem with the term Islamophobia. It was probably coined in the 1920s but came into common usage sometime in the 1990s, resurrected some say by Islamists as a parallel term to antisemitism, that is, the distrust and hatred of Jewish people. Beyond describing hatred of Muslims, in a cynical sense this word could be used to deflect criticism of Islam, equating the criticism of the religion with racism, much as the charge of antisemitism is sometimes used to deflect criticism of Israel.

Let me say this: hatred directed at Muslim people is real and like antisemitism, it is a scourge on humanity. There should just be a better word for it.

The problem with the term "Islamophobia" is that it does not, at least in its etymological sense, mean the hatred of a people as does the word antisemitism *, but rather the fear of a religion.

As our friend the Turkish tour guide pointed out, Islam is not confined to a single ethnicity or race. Because it is a missionary faith like Christianity, anyone can be a Muslim.

Given that, it should be obvious that the fear of a particular religion is not the same as the hatred of a people. The next question then should be this, can it be reasonable to fear a religion?

Well, when someone invokes the name of God before blowing him or herself up along with several innocent people on a bus, or intentionally flying an airplane into a skyscraper filled with thousands, or raping, torturing and butchering men women and children in their homes as they go about their daily lives, I'd say, yes, it is reasonable to fear that.

It is argued that all of these acts when done in the name of Islam, are a perversion of the religion, that Islam actually condemns in no uncertain terms the killing of innocent people. I have argued that myself in this space. 

Unfortunately like all religious dogma, there are loopholes. 

Some, such as the contemporary atheist philosopher and popular commentator Sam Harris, would say there are more such loopholes in Islam than in other contemporary religions, making it particularly dangerous. As I am far from an expert on Islam, I am not in any position to say if that is true.

What I do feel qualified to discuss is my own faith tradition, Christianity, specifically that of the Roman Catholic Church.

One obvious loophole in Catholicism is perhaps its most beautiful attribute, the spirit of forgiveness raised to an act of God through the Sacrament of Reconciliation, otherwise known as Confession. By openly revealing our sins we humble ourselves before God (through the intervention of a priest) and come to terms with the fact that yet another thing that binds us humans together is that we all make mistakes; we all fall short of the perfection of God. Most important of all, while forgiving our sins, God calls upon us to "forgive those who transgress against us". 

For me, one of the most powerful passages of the New Testament concerns forgiveness:

Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

Matthew 18:18

In other words, we are bound by our grudges big and small that we carry around through life like millstones around our necks. Forgiveness unbinds us of the millstone. Forgive, and we will be free of the burden, and can be forgiven ourselves.

This is one of the central tenets of Christianity.

However, in practice, like so many aspects of Catholic dogma, confession long ago came to be a ritual whose spirit got lost somewhere along the way. For many Catholics, reconciliation is all about one's own redemption while forgetting all that other boring stuff. Confession to many, is like a get out of jail free card in Monopoly, justifying bad actions in advance, knowing full well that a trip to the confessional and the penance of few Hail Marys will make everything AOK.

Obviously, that's not how it was intended to work. 

Yet for innumerable Catholics from little old ladies picking flowers without permission to professional hitmen, from priests abusing children to their bishops who swept their actions under the rug, sins big, small and enormous are intentionally committed by Catholics with the full expectation that God has their back, so long as they jump through the right hoops.

So much for good intentions.

Now anyone with a shred of history in their head, knows that the sins of the Roman Catholic Church are profound and numerous. The Crusades, the Inquisition, need I say more? I could go on all day but I won't. If there ever was a religion worthy of inciting fear, it would be the one in which I am a member.

I'm not certain how much the two acts of the Church I just mentioned were inspired by Christian scripture, or simply the acting out of tribal instincts in response to socio/political/economic events of the day, while using a cut and paste version of scripture to justify them. I suspect more the latter than the former. My guess is that Sam Harris would agree when he compares Christianity favorably to Islam, (remember he's an atheist so he rejects both). When Harris compares the two faiths as he has done recently, he doesn't point out those quite obvious examples of brutality committed in the name of Christ. Instead, Harris argues that morally speaking, we in the West (whatever that entails), as a civilization have come a long way since the days of the Crusades, and that the East has a lot of catching up to do. This, according to Harris, is a result of Islam holding them back. 

Sam Harris is not alone in defying current political correctness by singling out Islam as a backwards force. Here is link to a video of a lecture given by the popular astro-physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson introduced by Steven Weinberg, discussing the relationship between Islam and science.

I'm fairly certain that a vast number of people in the non-Muslim world, are not aware of the golden age of Islam of which Professor Tyson speaks. Coinciding with the Arab Empire, at the time the largest empire the world had ever known, it was a period of tremendous breakthroughs in human knowledge all brought to the world by Arab scholars, inventors, mathematicians, scientists, philosophers and other learned individuals. All this took place in what we in the West refer to as the "Dark Ages", a time when in Tyson's words, "the Europeans were busy disemboweling heretics". I might add that the Europeans at the same time, under the authority of the Church, were also busy burning books, attempting to destroy much of the accumulated knowledge of the world at the time, especially that written by pagans such as Plato and Aristotle, under the assumption that the only knowledge worth preserving was to be found in the Bible. 

Meanwhile the Arabs were taking much of that knowledge and translating it into Arabic. Had they not, scores of works of ancient philosophy, science, medicine and mathematics, may have been lost forever. 

And then it all stopped according to Tyson; scientific inquiry among Arabs ground to a halt somewhere in the 13th Century. He attributes this decline to one man, Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. According to Tyson, al-Ghazali codified Islam, much in the same way that St. Augustine codified Christianity. Among the tenets that al-Ghazali came up with Tyson says, is that "mathematics is the work of the devil." 

"Nothing good can come out of that philosophy" Tyson retorted.

Neil deGrasse Tyson has made a brilliant career of making complex scientific ideas accessible to the masses. I am a member of those masses. But simplification in order to explain an idea is not the same as dumbing something down in order to make a point, which he unfortunately does here. 

Parts of his premise are correct, in the period between 750 and 1258 CE, corresponding to the years of the Arab Empire, or more accurately the Abbasid Caliphate, centered in Baghdad and extending from Spain through Persia, there was an explosion of ground-breaking contributions made by Arabs in the fields of science, medicine, philosophy and education. He is also correct about the decline of those contributions, (although not nearly as abrupt as he claims) at the end of that period and from which there has been no significant recovery.

And yes, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, was indeed a profoundly influential Muslim cleric. some say second only to Mohammad himself regarding his influence on the faith. But al-Ghazali was also a polymath: an intellectual, a scholar, mystic, philosopher as well as theologian. He was as much a part of the golden age of Islam as anyone, as well as being a great influence on many non-Muslim philosophers including Maimonidies, Thomas Aquinas, and David Hume. 

Tyson states that al Ghazali taught people "how to be good Muslims", implying that to mean strict, unquestioning fealty to the Quran being the cornerstone of the faith, and that all earthly pursuits such as mathematics and science were not only fruitless but also contrary to the teachings of scripture. 

This could not be further from the truth. Al Ghazali was a firm advocate of reason and critical thinking and judgement. He insisted that earthly pursuits like math and science, which he groups together with philosophy, were essential studies, not in conflict with matters of faith. Reading a bit of his work, you can judge for yourself:

There are those things in which the philosophers believe, and which do not come into conflict with any religious principle. And, therefore, disagreement with the philosophers with respect to those things is not a necessary condition for the faith in the prophets and the apostles (may God bless them all). An example is their theory that the lunar eclipse occurs when the light of the Moon disappears as a consequence of the interposition of the Earth between the Moon and the Sun. ….

We are not interested in refuting such theories either; for the refutation will serve no purpose. He who thinks that it is his religious duty to disbelieve such things is really unjust to religion, and weakens its cause. For these things have been established by astronomical and mathematical evidence which leaves no room for doubt. If you tell a man, who has studied these things— so that he has sifted all the data relating to them, and is, therefore, in a position to forecast when a lunar or a solar eclipse will take place: whether it will be total or partial; and how long it will last —that these things are contrary to religion, your assertion will shake his faith in religion, not in these things. Greater harm is done to religion by an immethodical helper than by an enemy whose actions, however hostile, are in his yet regular. For, as the proverb goes, a wise enemy is better than an ignorant friend.

From  Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (Incoherence of the Philosophers)

In his thesis, Tyson gives little credence to the reasonable possibility that the decline of the scientific contributions of Arabs is likely to be attributable to the decline of their Empire after the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols (incidentally, ancestors of the modern-day Turks) in 1258, and the subsequent centuries of invasions by the Crusaders.  Instead, he insists that the strict religion foisted upon the Muslim people by al-Ghazali is the sole culprit.

Why? 

Well, al-Ghazali gets the last laugh on this one as he seems to have anticipated Neil deGrasse Tyson's comments by some nine centuries:

The greatest thing in which the atheists rejoice is for the defender of religion to declare these [astronomical demonstrations] and their like are contrary to religion thus the path for refuting religion becomes easy if the likes [of this argument defending religion] are rendered a condition [for its truth].

Again, from  Tahāfut al-Falāsifa

As one commentator noted, had Tyson spent five minutes reading the Wikipedia entry on al Ghazali, it "could have prevented him from completely misquoting Al Ghazali and shamelessly misrepresenting history." 

Indeed.

Yet even the staunchest defenders of Islam are at a loss to fully explain why there was never a rekindling of the glory days of scientific inquiry in the Arab and more broadly, the Muslim world since the twelfth century.

And the same people are even more at a loss to explain the horrific acts committed in the name of Allah.

But in this respect at least, Muslims are not alone in lamenting the fact that some of their brothers and sisters in faith have used their sacred scripture to justify abhorrent acts. 

Here is what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Israeli people shortly after the 10/7 Hamas attacks in their country:

You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.

Amalek, or the Amalekites, were enemies of the nation of Israel from biblical times.  

This is from the First book of Samuel, Chapter 15:

Thus says the Lord of hosts: ‘I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he ambushed him on the way when he came up from Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’ 

The God of the Old Testament didn't fool around.

It's hard to look at Israel's response in Gaza after the 10/7 attacks and not think this is what Netanyahu had in mind.

But for my money, historically speaking, the most devastating line of scripture found in any of the sacred texts of all three of the Abrahamic religions combined, (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) is found in the same Gospel of Matthew of the New Testament that I quoted from above.

You probably know the story. Jesus has been brought to the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate by the people of Jerusalem who insist he be punished for blasphemy for claiming he was the Son of God, and for other stuff that pissed them off. Pilate, the story goes, was warned by his wife to spare the life of Jesus because she had a troubling dream about him the night before. Despite his efforts to grant his wife's wishes, the last thing Pilate needed was an uprising on his hands, so he gave in to the crowd but not before admonishing them and passing the responsibility of Jesus' fate on to them, literally "washing his hands" of the affair. Here is their response to him:

Then answered all the people, and said, 'His blood be on us, and on our children.'

Matthew 27:25

"The people" the writer of the Gospel is referring to here, are the Jews. There you have it, scriptural proof that the Jews killed Jesus who in the view of Christians is the son of God, This is their confession. Not only are they condemning themselves, but their children as well, into eternity. Two millennia and counting worth of antisemitism along with all the pain, suffering and unspeakable horror that came from it, can be summed up in nine simple words. They are scriptural justification for hatred.

Take a deep breath to put all that into perspective. 

Of course, anyone who has ever taken those nine words to heart, and there have been many hundreds of millions throughout history, didn't bother with a couple other crucial verses in the same story, one taking place a few hours before, the other a few hours later in the narrative. 

When the officials came to arrest Jesus, one of his disciples took his sword and cut off the ear of one of the officials. This is what follows:

Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.

Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?

But how then shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?

Matthew 26:52-54

If you are a Christian, you believe that the death and resurrection of Jesus are God's plan for the salvation of the world. That is why the day we commemorate Jesus' death is called "Good" Friday. Without Good Friday, there would be no Easter Sunday commemorating the central event of the faith.

The people who sent Jesus to his death were merely actors in God's plot.

And how are we to think of those people?

For that we turn to another Gospel:

And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left. Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment and cast lots.

Luke 23:34-35

There you have it, if Jesus himself is asking God for the forgiveness of the people who arrested him, spit at him, mocked him, beat him, nailed him to a tree to die then cast lots for his clothing, then who are we to condemn them?

This brings us to what I believe is the central question at hand, what comes first, scriptural verses that inspire hatred, or the hatred itself which becomes justified through a selected reading of scripture?

I would strongly advocate for the latter-- that hatred comes first. People who see religion only as a negative force in the world single out all the horrific acts that have taken place in the name of God, but are loath to point out the acts of good that come from religion. I've heard Sam Harris claim that you don't need religion in your life to be a good person, to which I agree. At the risk of sounding like a cliché, some of the best people I've known have been atheists. Conversely, I think it's obvious that you don't need religion to be a bad person either. Some of the gravest acts against humanity, especially in the last 150 years have been carried out without any religious pretext at all.

In defense of religion I will say this: fear and hatred are very natural human responses to adversity; they are self-defense mechanisms we inherited from our pre-historic ancestors. No, we don't need religion to teach us how to hate those who have done us wrong, real or imagined, we're all very capable of that on our own, thank you very much. 

But what about virtues such as kindness, charity, patience, selflessness, justice and the "golden rule" which all faiths promote and aspire to?

These virtues do not come naturally, they need to be taught.

What about loving our enemies as Jesus commanded? 

That idea is so outrageous, absurd and un-natural that despite all my doubts about whether God exists, it  is the one thing that truly confirms my faith, simply because it's hard for me to believe that this command was made up by a mere mortal as it goes against every instinct of our earthly being. 

Yet there it is.

Religion, like all human inventions (Artificial Intelligence immediately comes to mind), is a tool that can be put to good use and bad. Today being New Years Eve, it is customary to think of the people we have lost over the previous 364 days. The person I'm thinking about at the moment is Rosalyn Carter, who along with her husband the former president, spent the last half of her life in service, building homes with her own hands for the homeless. The Carters are examples of people who put their faith to good use. They are far from unique as there are people of all creeds in every corner of the planet who put their faith to good use in the service of others and help make the world a better place. 

Which makes me think of one of the humblest tools the Carters put into service in their work for Habitat for Humanity, the lowly hammer. 

In the right hands, that hammer can be used to build homes for the homeless and other wondrous things. 

In the wrong hands it can be used to bash somebody's head in.

Religion is no different. 

CODA

* There is a bit of a problem with the word antisemitism as well, as included in the Semitic peoples are Arabs. Yet the word is exclusively used to describe prejudice against Jewish people. 

** An even more demonstrable error in Neil deGrasse Tyson's lecture on Islam and science is his mention of a quote President George W. Bush made supposedly after the 9/11 attacks. Bush did say "Our God named the stars", loosely quoting Psalm 147:4, but he did not deliver those words after the terrorist attack, and certainly not as a means to compare and contrast Christians and Muslims as Tyson implies. 

Rather, Bush made the remark during a tribute to the seven astronauts killed in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003. The president in fact made it crystal clear after 9/11 that Muslims are as much a part of the fabric of American life as any other group and denounced in no uncertain terms the prejudice and hatred against them that followed the attack and continues to this day. Here is a link to a speech the former president gave during a visit to the Islamic Centre in Washington, D.C., less than a week after the attack.