Ziauddin Sardar, a Muslim writer, contributed an opinions article to the London Times this morning. Sardar didn’t lament the Western world’s misunderstanding of Islam. Though it is a salutory reminder to be reassured from time to time that our battle with the Muslim world isn’t of a religion nature, I appreciated his choice to write with his head and not his heart. And since when have religious wars been about anything but culture?
It would be misleading to suggest that Sardar’s article is not an attempt at reorienting our perceptions of Islam. But what differentiates it from its banal counterparts is first that the approach is cultural (which is the right way to look at it) and that he’s not all too pleased about his own role in the contentious Muslim world. Not only is he disaffected, he also feels that this is a wide frustration of a generation. Young Muslims, at least in England, seem to be pretty pissed off with the “obscurants” who categorically restrain reform and progress.
Sardar is a spry and discerning cultural observer. What’s more, he’s thoroughly British. In fact, his British-ness is perhaps the most compelling and salient point in all of this. Sardar doesn’t contemn the West because he’s not the one we’re after. He’s already joined our side. It underscores the Huntingtonian view that religion has never been more than a barometer for a much more vast and shadowy culture clash. It is reasonable to say that the average Muslim takes their religion more seriously than his counterpart in Protestant America, but are American apathetics really precluded by doctrine?
Hardly. Rather, any preclusion can be found at the source of personal identity. Americans are private creatures, stocked away in middle-class homes where we cannot be grasped by the vaporous “public”. In a technologically endowed, otiose culture, mass media obviates community. Socially, we deal in fungible images (a phrase of Jonathan Franzen’s), suggestive fragments of personality, and glittery evanescence. Privately, we are permitted to nurse our shortcomings and faulty foundations in frantic anxiety until our ravenous need for privacy and personal space becomes utterly visceral.
While this is a rather bleak rendering of the American reality, it does explain the lack of cohesive communities. Though Americans may cling to religion (in some cases, through extreme and fundamentalist beliefs), the result is far more desperate than deliberate. Conversely, the quiet but steadfast areligious undercurrent in America is deep-rooted and growing, especially among the young liberal elite. This is a bout between God and the human brain, a conundrum that is perpetually more flummoxing. Smart kids from middle-class backgrounds grow up without the community of a time past and are shoved into the arms of the media, or if they’re lucky, their educations. Oddly enough, it is the class of cosmopolitan arisocrats that pressures us back towards national community. Equipped with stylish clothes and alluring agnosticism (which can typify its participants so prominently that it takes on an unmistakable religiosity of its own), the newfangled intellectuals are politically motivated and ready for somewhere to go. Not to mention that they remind me of Ziauddin Sardar.
Will direction be found? Paul Krugman, in today’s New York Times op-ed, reported that the failed bid of southern states for a proposed Toyota factory was lost due to the superior workforce of our Canadian counterparts. Though Krugman argues tendentiously, his point that it is time to start letting the government tax and better educate us resonates. When stories like the Toyota debacle emerge, it’s hard to see why we didn’t want this in the first place. But upon analysis, intensifying public education and restoring secular community in our country is exactly the sort of democratic interaction that scares the daylights out of us. It obliterates our right to not be accountable to anything.
Is it possible that a large part of America is shamming religious verity? Yes, but I maintain that religion is not the problem in all of this. Thomas Friedman has boldly suggested that Muslim incontinence and unwillingness to decry terrorism has coddled and fostered a malignant “death cult” of terrorism. Israel, cites Friedman, has made deliberate efforts to publicly castigate those who, in the words of Ariel Sharon, engage in callous acts of “thuggery.” I agree with Friedman. Unfortunately, I feel that cultural responsibility is also absent from the United States.
The encroachment of civilizations is very delicate. It is due time for the United States to begin remembering its enlightened origins, to ratchet down its reckless jingoism, and act uprightly until the Muslim world can heal its deep wounds.
-J.B., Pittsford, NY