Indeed this is nowhere more apparent than in the matter that called forth Christ’s ironical judgement. Not only is stoning to death still officially endorsed in many parts of the Muslim world as a punishment for adultery; in many Islamic communities women are treated as prostitutes just as soon as they step out of the line drawn for them by men. The subject of sex, which cannot be usefully discussed without a measure of irony, has therefore become a painful topic among Muslims, confronted as they inevitably are by the lax morals and libidinous confusion of Western societies. Our mullahs are unable to think about women as sexual beings, and unable to think for very long about anything else. As a result an enormous tension has developed in the Muslim communities in Western cities, the young men enjoying the surrounding freedoms, the young women hidden away and often terrorised lest they should do the same.
Irony was seen by the late Richard Rorty as a state of mind intimately connected with the postmodern worldview – a withdrawal from judgement that nevertheless aims at a kind of consensus, a shared agreement not to judge.1 It seems to me, however, that irony, although it infects our states of mind, is better understood as a virtue – a disposition aimed at a kind of practical fulfilment and moral success. If I were to venture a definition of this virtue, I would describe it as a habit of acknowledging the otherness of everything, including oneself. However convinced you are of the rightness of your actions and the truth of your views, look on them as the actions and the views of someone else, and rephrase them accordingly. So defined, irony is quite distinct from sarcasm: it is a mode of acceptance, rather than a mode of rejection. And it points both ways: through irony I learn to accept both the other on whom I turn my gaze, and also myself, the one who is gazing. Irony is not free from judgement: it simply recognises that the one who judges is also judged, and judged by himself.
And this brings me to the fifth notable feature of Western civilisation that is at stake in the current confrontation: the feature of self-criticism. It is second nature to us, whenever we affirm something, to allow a voice to the opponent. The adversarial method of deliberation is endorsed by our law, by our forms of education, and by the political systems that we have built to broker our interests and resolve our conflicts. Think of those vociferous critics of Western civilisation such as the late Edward Saïd and the ubiquitous Noam Chomsky. Saïd, for example, spoke out in uncompromising and at times even venomous terms on behalf of the Islamic world against the residual outlook, as he saw it, of Western imperialism. So what happened to him? He was rewarded with a prestigious chair in a leading university, and with countless opportunities for public speaking in America and around the Western world: just as Chomsky has been. This habit of rewarding our critics is, I think, unique to Western civilisation, and the only shame is that, in American universities, things have gone so far that there are no rewards for anyone else. The prizes are distributed on the left, because this feeds the ruling illusion, that self-criticism will bring us safety, and that all threats come from ourselves and from our desire to defend what we have.
There is another critical feature of Western civilisation which grows from the habit of self-criticism, and that is representation. We in the West, and the English-speaking peoples pre-eminently, are heirs to a longstanding habit of free association, in which we join together in clubs, businesses, pressure groups, and educational foundations. This associative genius was particularly remarked upon by de Tocqueville in his journeys through America, and it is facilitated by the unique branch of the English common law – equity and the law of trusts – which enables people to set up funds in common and to administer them without asking permission from any higher authority.
This associative habit goes with the tradition of representation. When we form a club or a society that has a public profile we are in the habit of appointing officers to represent it. The decisions of these officers are then assumed to be binding on all members, and cannot be rejected without leaving the club. In this way a single individual might be able to speak for a group, and in doing so bind them to accept the decisions made in their name. We find nothing strange in this, and it has affected political, educational, economic and leisure institutions in our society, in incalculable ways that it would be otiose to spell out. It has also affected the government of our religious institutions, both Catholic and Protestant. Indeed, it was among 19th century protestant theologians that the theory of the corporation as a moral idea was first fully developed. We know that the hierarchy of our church, be it Baptist, Episcopalian or Catholic, is empowered to take decisions on our behalf, and can enter into dialogue with institutions in other parts of the world, in order to secure the space that we require for our worship.
Association takes a very different form in traditional Islamic societies. Clubs and societies of strangers are rare, and the primary social unit is not the free association but the family. Companies did not enjoy a developed legal framework under Islamic law, and it has been argued by Malise Ruthven and others that the concept of the corporate person has no equivalent in that law.2 Charities are organised in a completely different way – not as property held in trust for beneficiaries, but as property that has been ‘stopped’ (waqf); and all public entities, such as schools and hospitals, are regarded as ancillary to the mosque and governed by religious principles. Meanwhile the mosque itself is not a corporate person, nor is there an entity which we could call the Mosque, on the analogy of the Church – an entity whose decisions are binding on its members, which can negotiate on their behalf, and which can be held to account for its misdeeds and abuses.
As a result of this long tradition of associating only under the aegis of the mosque or the family, Islamic communities lack the conception of the spokesman.3 When there are serious conflicts between Muslim minorities and the surrounding society in our cities we have found it difficult, if not impossible, to negotiate, since there is no one who will speak for the Muslim faction or take responsibility for imposing any decision. If, by any chance, someone does step forward, then the individual members of the Muslim community feel free to accept or reject his decisions at will. And the same problem has been witnessed in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other places with radicalised Muslim populations. When someone does step forward to speak for some dissident group it is very often on his own initiative, and without any procedure that validates his office. And as like as not, should he agree to some solution, he will be assassinated, or at any rate disowned, by the radical members of the group for whom he purports to be speaking.
This leads me to reflect again on the idea of citizenship. One important reason for the stability and peacefulness of societies based on citizenship is that individuals exist in those societies fully protected by their rights – fenced off from their neighbours in their spheres of private sovereignty, where they alone make the decisions. This means that a society of citizens can establish good relations and a shared allegiance among strangers. You don’t have to know your fellow citizen in order to ascertain your rights against him or your duties towards him, and his being a stranger in no way alters the fact that you are each prepared to die for the territory that contains you and the law which you enjoy. This remarkable feature of citizen-states is sustained by the things to which I have referred: by self-criticism, representation and corporate life, and it is not to be observed in traditional Islamic societies. What the Islamist movements promise to their adherents is not citizenship but brotherhood – ikhwān – an altogether warmer, closer and more metaphysically satisfying thing.
However, the warmer and closer an attachment, the less widely can it be spread. Brotherhood is selective and exclusive; it cannot be spread very far without exposing itself to sudden and violent refutation. Hence the Arab proverb, I and my brother against my cousin, I and my cousin against the world. The association of brothers is not a new entity, a corporation, which can negotiate for its members. It remains essentially plural – and indeed ikhwān is simply the plural of akh, brother, and used to denote the assembly
of like-minded people brought together by their common commitment, rather than any institution that can claim sovereignty over them. This has significant political repercussions. When Nasser’s successor as president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, set aside seats in the Egyptian Parliament for the Muslim brotherhood, they were immediately occupied by those judged suitable by the president, and disowned by the real brotherhood, which continued its violent activities, until contriving the assassination of Sadat. Brothers don’t take orders: they act together as a family, until they quarrel and fight.
This last contrast between Western and traditional Islamic communities brings me to a final and critical point of difference. We live in a society of strangers, who associate rapidly and tolerate each other’s differences. Ours is not a society of vigilant conformity; it makes few public demands that are not contained in the secular law; and it allows people to move quickly from one group to the next, one relationship to the next, one business, religion or way of life to the next. It is endlessly creative in finding the institutions and associations that will enable people to live with their differences and to remain on peaceful terms, without the need for intimacy, brotherhood or tribal loyalties. I don’t say that this is a good thing; but it is the way things are, and the inevitable by-product of citizenship as I have described it. So what makes it possible to live in this way? There is a simple answer, and that is drink. That which the Koran promises in paradise but forbids here below is the necessary lubricant of the Western dynamo. You see this clearly in America, where cocktail parties immediately break the ice between strangers, and set every large gathering in motion, stimulating a collective desire for rapid agreement, among people who a moment before did not know one another from Adam. This way of quickly coming to the point depends on many aspects of our culture besides drink: but drink is critical, and those who have studied the phenomenon are largely persuaded that, for all the cost that our civilisation has paid in terms of alcoholism, accidents and broken homes, it is thanks to drink that we have been, in the long run, so successful. Of course, Islamic societies have their own ways of creating fleeting associations – the hookah, the coffee house, and the traditional bath-house, praised by Lady Mary Wortley Montague as establishing a solidarity among women that has no equivalent in the Christian world. But these forms of association are also forms of withdrawal, a standing back from the business of government in a posture of peaceful resignation. Drink has the opposite effect – bringing strangers together in a state of controlled aggression, able and willing to engage in any business that should arise from the current conversation.
The features that I have referred to do not merely explain the uniqueness of Western civilisation: they also account for its success in negotiating the enormous changes that have come about through technological and scientific advance, just as they explain the political stability and democratic ethos of its component nations. The features also distinguish Western civilisation from the Islamic communities in which the terrorists are bred. And they explain the great resentment of those terrorists, who cannot match, from their own moral and religious resources, the easy competence towards the modern world that we witness in Europe and America.
If this is so, then how should we defend the West from Islamist terrorism? I shall suggest a brief answer to that question. First we should be clear about what it is that we are defending. We are not defending our wealth or our territory, since these are not in issue. We are defending our political and cultural inheritance – and these are embodied in the seven features which I have singled out for attention. Secondly, we should be clear that you don’t overcome resentment by feeling guilty, or by conceding your fault. Weakness provokes, since it alerts your enemy to the possibility of destroying you. We should be prepared to affirm what we have and to express our determination to hold on to it. That said, we must recognise that it is not envy, but resentment, that animates the terrorist. Envy is the desire to possess what the other has; resentment is the desire to destroy it. How do you deal with resentment? This is the great question that so few leaders of mankind have been able to answer. But Christians are fortunate in being heirs to the one great attempt to answer it, which was that of Christ, drawing on a long-standing Jewish tradition that goes back to the Torah, and which was also expressed in similar terms by Christ’s contemporary, Rabbi Hillel. You overcome resentment, Christ told us, by forgiving it. To reach out in a spirit of forgiveness is not to accuse yourself; it is to make a gift to the other. And it is just here, it seems to me, that we have taken the wrong turn in recent decades. The illusion that we are to blame, that we must confess our faults and join our cause to that of the enemy, exposes us to a more determined hatred. The truth is that we are not to blame, that the enemy’s hatred is entirely unjustified, that his implacable enmity cannot be defused by our breast-beating. And this truth makes it seem as though we are powerless.
However, we are not powerless. There are two resources on which we can call in our defence, one public, one private. In the public sphere we can set out to protect the good things that we have inherited. And that means making no concessions to those who wish us to exchange citizenship for subjecthood, nationality for religious conformity, secular law for shari’ah, the Judeo-Christian inheritance for Islam, irony for solemnity, self-criticism for dogmatism, representation for submission, and cheerful drinking for censorious abstinence. We should treat with scorn all those who demand these changes and invite them to live where their preferred form of political order is already installed. And we must respond to their violence with whatever force is required to contain it, if we can.
In the private sphere, however, Christians should follow the path laid down for us by Christ, and that means looking soberly and in a spirit of forgiveness on the hurts that we receive, and showing, by our example, that these hurts achieve nothing save to discredit the one who inflicts them. This is the hard part of the task – hard to perform, hard to endorse and hard to recommend to others.
Notes
1 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity
2 Malise Ruthven, Islam in the World.
3 There is an important exception to this rule in the world-wide Isma‘īlī community, which has found its representative and spokesman in the Aga Khan.
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