Fitna

The bug post was a way for me to avoid posting about Fitna, but I realize I can't avoid it. This is a post that I probably shouldn't post at this stage. I don't thnk I've gotten my ideas straight. But I also don't think I have the emotional energy to work on it much more for now. Plus, the Engaging Muslim series in Wendy Williamson Auditorium will have another speaker on Sunday March 30, at 2pm so it seems timely to get this out now.

I got an email this morning. It began:

Dear Volunteer Corps Southeast
Asia,

We are writing to inform you of a controversial anti-Koran short film that has just been posted to the internet and the security risks associated with it. Given that there is increased risk we ask that you monitor the internet to keep abreast of developments around this story. If you do not have access to the internet, please make sure that we can reach you by phone in case there is a flare-up connected to the film.

So I, of course, had to find the film on the internet and watch it. Then I read more posts about it, including an interview with Geertz Wilders the Dutch member of parliament who produced the film.



Do I feel threatened? No, not at all. I'm in Northern Thailand. I'm more worried about getting hit by a car or motorcycle as I walk home up the dark, narrow street we live on. Maybe if I were in Southern Thailand where there is a Muslim anti-Thai government movement (and has been since I was here 40 years ago, but then they called it Communist). But I also realize that I got this email because I'm a volunteer for the American Jewish World Service.

And then there are the ironies of modern technology. On this website that features this anti-Muslim film that was predicted to cause mass riots and violence, we find Google Ads for How to How to Convert to Islam and Muslim Marriage Bureau.

But all this chatter on my part is me avoiding the main issue. The movie itself takes a few quotes from the Koran and then has clips of Muslim speakers telling their followers to kill non-believers, which Wilders thinks proves that the Koran promotes a "Fascist" ideology.

I'm not an Islamic scholar and I simply do not have enough information to come to a valid conclusion. Radical Catholic Mom had a link the other day to an article about a Coptic Priest who broadcasts to the Arabic speaking world in Arabic about the Koran and challenges Islamic clerics to refute his claims that the Koran advocates some hateful ideas and practices. That seems a better approach to me. (Though I'm assuming the writers of this piece want their subject to look good and I don't know what others say about him.) In contrast Wilders' movie is aimed at the Western world, warning that Muslims intend to take over the world and destroy democracy. And that now is the time to take action. I can't help but note that the website also says with no apparent irony,

As self-proclaimed “defender of free speech” and critic of Islam, he has sought to ban the Koran in the Netherlands because he believes it to be in conflict with Dutch law.

I'm stalling here, because I still haven't distilled out the key issues. Forget Fitna the film, but watch the Fox News Interviews - with a skeptical ear. I don't agree with Wilders conclusions, but as he goes along, he raises issues that must be addressed. The fears of people are what take us to war. I think the fears of the Dutch people, which have made Wilders one of the most popular Dutch politicians, must be considered, because that is what they act on. But I would also argue that the fears and despair of many Muslims are what causes them to act with hate as well.

While Wilders begins talking about the Koran as the source of problems, he eventually starts talking about the Dutch system as the problem. While he claims that the Dutch have done everything reasonable to assimilate Muslims, the Muslims have refused to go along. (If you had fled your homeland, say because you couldn't find work or support your family, and your new homeland happened to be Islamic, would you just switch to using Arabic at home and start your Islam conversion classes?)

Like Americans were taught about the melting pot for years in school, Wilders' idea is that the immigrants should become thoroughly Dutch citizens. Even if this was what they wanted, even it they could just do that, I suspect (and I have had discussions with European 'ethnic' students who were studying in Anchorage the past two summers) that many Dutch Muslims would say the Dutch don't accept them. I believe Wilders believes what he says about the Dutch making efforts to integrate the Muslims. The problem is that it is from a "the Dutch way is right and yours is wrong" perspective. After all, if yours was right, why are you here? Not an unreasonable question. Except the reasons people are there are complex, as were the reasons so many Dutch left Holland for the North America since the 18th Century.

Changing to a different part of this topic, radical Islam is about power and powerlessness.

Young men everywhere want to identify with the strong hero who saves the world.

Young Muslim men in the Middle East and elsewhere have seen themselves as powerless. The West has the power. The ideas and cultures of Islam are portrayed in the world media and in the global distribution of wealth as powerless and backward. It wasn't long ago that Muslims had respect in the world. I would note that it was only after I graduated from college - it was never in my history classes - that I learned that the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922)

[a]t the height of its power (16th–17th century)... spanned three continents, controlling much of Southeastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, stretching from the Strait of Gibraltar (and, in 1553, the Atlantic coast of Morocco beyond Gibraltar) in the west to the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf in the east, from the edge of Austria, Slovakia and parts of Ukraine in the north to Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia and Yemen in the south. The Ottoman Empire contained 29 provinces, in addition to the tributary principalities of Moldavia, Transylvania, and Wallachia.

The empire was at the centre of interactions between the Eastern and Western worlds for six centuries. The Ottoman Empire was, in many respects, an Islamic successor to earlier Mediterranean empires — namely the Roman and Byzantine empires. (more a Wikipedia)

But today's world has been thoroughly dominated by non-Muslims and the Muslim world, despite its oil and some very rich elite, lives in relative physical poverty compared to the West. This contrast gets exacerbated when people immigrate to Western Europe.

And remember, much of this immigration was instigated by governments who needed laborers in post WW II Europe, and in the case of Germany they invited Gastarbeiter (Guest Workers), first from Italy and Greece, and then from Turkey. But, until recently, their grandchildren, born in Germany to parents who were born in Germany, could not get German citizenship. I can't go into all of this because I don't have time and I don't know all of it. My point is simply that this is not the black and white (Dutch have been wonderful hosts and the Muslims have abused our hospitality) story Wilders portrays.

When I was a student in Europe in the mid 60s, you almost never saw a non-white face. If you did they were either students or guest workers. In those days Europeans could smugly criticize the US for its handling of American blacks. But now the face of Europe has radically changed. If immigration is an issue in the US, it is a much more potent issue in Europe where the influx of people with very different world views has been swift and threatening to what had been far more homogeneously populated countries than the US. The fear that their way of life is being taken away is quite understandable. But globalization works both ways, not simply bringing European ideas to Africa, Asia, and South America, but African, Asian, and South American people, as well as resources, to Europe. Europe and the US cannot change the lives of others without having our lives changed as well.

The questions I'm trying to articulate revolve around the different world views, the different stories people have. But so many things are intertwined. Here are some of the factors that seem to be involved:

• The heritage of colonialism. The extent to which the European empires - the British, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Belgian, the French, and the German - play in all this is difficult to quantify factor. The Muslim immigrant population in UK, for instance, is hugely made up of people from former colonies. I think this is true of France and Spain as well. See the film Days of Glory/Indigenes to get a sense of the betrayal that North Africans felt in France

• Economic dominance of the West. While the political controls of the colonial empires were mostly dissolved in the 1960s, the economic control of the former colonies continued. Shell is a Dutch oil company, for example.

• Feelings of powerlessness. How much of the problem stems from the feelings of powerlessness and resentment of peoples subject to Euro-American economic, political, and military control of much of the world?
  

• Factors of Islam? What is it about Islam that it produces a violent reaction, whereas Buddhist and Hindu reaction are different? Is this a feature of Islam as Wilder claims, or is it a feature of people taking advantage of of the despair, who offer a native solution - Islam - to the powerless young men of the Islamic world?
  
  Or is it something about Arabic cultures? Malaysian and Indonesian Muslims seem to operate differently. Certainly Americans would respond with violence if their nation were invaded. We celebrate the violence of the Boston Tea Party in our history books. And Christianity used violence in the Crusades, in the conquering of the Amricas. And the Old Testemant, the holy book of Jews and one of two books of Christians, holds its share of violence and the destruction of people who do not worship the Jews' god.
  

• Dutch treatment of immigrants. Wilders himself has strong words about how the Dutch system exacerbates the problem. How much of the problem (in Holland) is the Dutch response to immigration and welfare? It appears that their approach was to treat the immigrants as though they had Dutch values and now they are resentful that the immigrants didn't respond as Dutch citizens would have.

I don't know the answers. As you can see, I'm still struggling to figure out the questions.

Perhaps people going to hear Dr. Ingrid Mattson, President of the Islamic Society of North America, speak at Wendy Williamson Auditorium Sunday, March 30, as part of APU's Engaging Muslims program can raise these questions and have a real candid, yet respectful discussion.