Monday, January 31, 2005
(8:39 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Islamic Law
I'm no expert on Islam. I had an exceptionally good high school education when it came to such matters, but I haven't really gone out of my way to learn more since then. With that in mind, the remarks that follow could very well be entirely wrong, but I'm going to write it anyway:Why would it necessarily be a bad thing for Muslim clerics to be closely involved with government, in Iraq or any other country? Why do people worry about the prospect of basing laws on Islam? I think the experience of Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity, has led us to expect that every religion will be politically disengaged to a criminal degree. In point of fact, Islam is a particular form of politics, and Muhammed was a military conquerer -- I'm sure that Islam really is a peaceful religion, as noted Islamic scholars George W. Bush and Tony Blair have repeatedly claimed, but it's not really hard to be peaceful when you hold power over a good chunk of the world, as Islam did for centuries. And apparently that huge swath of the world was governed pretty well by Islamic law, which I'm sure is a much more variegated and rich tradition than the current wacko advocates of Islamic law make it out to be (of course, I might just be assuming that there's a parallel to Christianity here when there isn't one).
Many thought that Milbank's remarks about Islamic forms of government were naive, but conditions in the Islamic world have not been such that Islamic forms of government could naturally develop. Instead, every country has been ruled by some tyrranical dictator (or just plain tyrant -- I agree with Agamben's remarks that we shouldn't dignify people like Saddam Hussein by calling them by the same name as the emergency leaders of Rome), who has incidentally been either installed or supported by our fine Christian nation. In situations like that -- say, in Iran, where the Shah was ruling -- it may well be that only people with crazy religious views (i.e., views that are disconnected from reality) are going to have the courage and resolve to overthrow the leader in question, and they are likely going to have popular support because of what they're defending against. In situations of non-tyrrany, the views of the majority are likely to be non-crazy, because most people refrain from being crazy or supporting craziness except for strictly pragmatic reasons.
In any case, allowing people to draw upon and reactivate existing and long-standing religio-political traditions makes a lot more sense than just assuming that something like "the American system" is universally and immediately applicable to all human groups. Of course, if we dropped the assumption that the American model is necessary for full participation in humanity and the assumption that a population that shows itself to be unworthy of such a wonderful form of government can only be controlled by a tough guy with a moustache who will stave off "the worst," then we'd have to completely reformulate our foreign policy.
