Tuesday, November 22, 2005
(12:36 PM) | Anonymous:
Teaching Melville in Madrasas
The current issue of The New York Review of Books contains two jarringly complementary articles. The first is Frederick Crews' review [subscribers only] of Andrew Delbanco's critical biography of Melville. Delbanco treats Melville as "one of those writers whom Lionel Trilling described as 'repositories of the dialectics of their times' in the sense that they contain 'both the yes and no of their culture.'" Thus:Respect for the past, in Delbanco's case, includes eschewing the revisionists' "gotcha!" approach to a dead author's limitations and instead trying to recreate the dilemmas that he faced. On the pivotal issue of abolitionism, for example, Delbanco doesn't buy the crude idea that Melville's reluctance to become an activist was motivated by a wish to avoid offending his benefactor and kin, Judge Shaw. No one in Melville's day could envision how the slaves might be emancipated without causing secession. Although the novelist made it plain that he detested slavery, he joined the great majority of his Northern compatriots in hoping to avoid the gruesome war that would soon cost over 600,000 American lives. To condemn him with the hindsight of 150 years, Delbanco would doubtless say, is simply to reveal one's own failure of historical imagination.This is not historicism for historicism's sake, according to Delbanco, but historicism in the service of moral and political complexity. Read in his original context, Melville should not be censured for his failure to condemn slavery because the experience of living in a tumultuous time includes "both the yes and no of [a] culture." Normally I find this quasi-æstheticist pose painfully insufficient—a flaccid defense of New Critical orthodoxy—but another article in the current NYRB suggests the insufficiency of my own pose.
William Dalrymple's "Inside the Madrasa" [free content] opens with the following anecdote:
Here, straddling the noisy, truck-thundering Islamabad highway, stands the Haqqania, one of the most radical of the religious schools called madrasas.This account of Pakistani madrasas squares with what I've read for the past four or five years; namely, that they're Saudi-financed fundamentalist schools in which the indoctrination of radical Islamic thought occurs daily. Then Dalrymple begins to hedge:
Many of the Taliban leaders, including Mullah Omar, were trained at this institution. If its teachings have been blamed for inspiring the brutal, ultra-conservative incarnation of Islamic law that that regime presided over, there is no sign that the Haqqania is ashamed of its former pupils: instead, the madrasa's director, Maulana Sami ul-Haq, still proudly boasts that whenever the Taliban put out a call for fighters, he would simply close down the madrasa and send his students off to fight. In many ways, then, Akora Khattack represents everything that US policymakers most fear and dislike in this region, a bastion of religious, intellectual, and sometimes—in the form of the Taliban—military resistance to Pax Americana and all it represents.
It is certainly true that many madrasas are fundamentalist and literalist in their approach to the scriptures and that many subscribe to the most hard-line strains of Islamic thought. Few make any effort to prepare their students to function in a modern, plural society. It is also true that some madrasas can be directly linked to Islamic radicalism and occasionally to outright civil violence.No only do high profile radicals "function in a modern, plural society," they do so with aplomb. Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's chief of staff, was a pediatric surgeon; the average madrasa student learns medicine from Galen. Mohammed Atta was an architect; the average madrasa student learns geometry from Euclid. (Did someone say something about a stalking-horse?) Dalrymple's point, Madrasas are not breeding grounds for fundamentals and terrorists, the Haqqania and its ilk notwithstanding. They are institutional bulwarks against radical textual interpretation, focusing on "the correct fulfillment of rituals, how to wash correctly before prayers, and the proper length to grow a beard." To wit:
[S]hortly after September 11, bin Laden told a group of visiting Saudis that the "youths who conducted the operations did not accept any fiqh [school of Islamic law] in the popular term, but they accepted the fiqh that the Prophet Muhammad brought." It is a telling quote: bin Laden showing his impatience with legal training and the inherited structures of Islamic authority. The hijackers, he implied, were taking effective practical action rather than sitting around discussing legal texts. As such he set himself up as a challenge to the madrasas and the ulema, bypassing traditional modes of religious study and looking directly to the Koran for guidance.Unlike Omar Sheikh, the London School of Economics graduate who kidnapped Daniel Pearl, the man who spends hours studying "the proper length to grow a beard" will not think to question the Koranic code taught to him at a madrasa. He will consider text and tradition inviolate elements of a culture of faith, whereas the Englishman who comes to Islam late in life will consider the text itself inviolate. Of course, the average Englishman lives a kingly life compared to that of the impoverished madrasa student. And with this I return to Melville and Deblanco and ask:
Should we advocate the modernization of Islamic culture or should we support a return to traditionalism?A century from now, the answer to this question will be obvious. It will possess the same clarity which encourages condemnations of historical figures for their "patent" moral or political "lapses." But for the life of me, I don't know what it is.
