My colleague, Professor Schaff, posts a link to the ten minute film Fitna, on YouTube. You can view it from his post. The film is a dramatic presentation of passages in the Koran that encourage violence, coupled with graphic images of terrorist attacks. As Professor Schaff reports, the clip was removed from the website LiveLeak (a YouTube clone hosted, I believe in Britain) after members of its staff were threatened. As my colleague notes, there is no small irony in this. The threats confirm the thesis of the film.
Islam is a problem for modern civilization. It is not that all Muslim endorse religious violence, or that other religions are innocent of such violence. But contemporary Islam contains within it a radically militant and murderous faction, and that faction is much larger than anything resembling it in any other major religion and it is widely distributed. Outside Sri Lanka, perhaps, almost no one has to fear religiously inspired violence from Buddhists. Even in Israel, religiously inspired violence by militant Jews is a very rare event. When was the last time that militant Christians planted a bomb on a subway train, or threatened to murder a film-maker? But anyone who lives in a country with a substantial Muslim population, and who dares to publish anything that offends Muslims, may find himself or herself in the position of LiveLeak's proprietors.
The standard liberal response has been to be as accommodating as possible toward Muslims. Universities have built foot baths for Muslim students, and recently one has established sexually segregated gym hours. A British cleric went so far as to recommend that Sharia (Islamic law) be respected within Muslim immigrant communities, which would grant to the clerics a power over their congregations that no other religion is allowed. There is a problem with all this. If accommodating Muslims means allowing them liberties we do not allow any other religious population, it means that liberal democracy is in retreat.
The best thing I have seen on this is in the current New Republic. Leon Wieseltier has a piece entitled "Theologico-Politicus." The title is a reference to Spinoza's great Treatise. Wieseltier is responding to articles in the New York Times Magazine, Time, and elsewhere presenting the face of "moderate Islam," while pointing out how repressive Orthodox Jews can be. Here is the key passage in Wieseltier's essay:
I do not want The New York Times to become the voice of moderate Judaism, or of any Judaism. I want only that liberals desist from granting Muslims a reprieve from the rigors of liberalism.
Yes. That is it pretty much the point on which our civilization either stands or falls. By "liberalism" Wieseltier means liberal democracy, a regime in which human beings govern themselves, both individually and collectively. Such a regime ought to offer the greatest possible accommodation to religion, because that is part of what individual self-government entails. But the price for enjoying such a liberty is respect for the liberties of everyone else. And that means everyone, even those whose cartoons offend thee, even those who are members of thine own church. Anything more is "granting Muslims a reprieve from the rigors of liberalism."
Muslims should be offered all the liberties available to any religious minority in a modern democracy, but no more than that. If they insist on more as the price of peace, if they want to censure the press or limit the freedoms of their own faithful, then the price is too high. If modern liberal regimes are not prepared to fight about this, then liberal democracy is finished.
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