When Dalrymple Breaks Down

This is my response to Theodore Dalrymple's "When Islam Breaks Down," posted at the City Journal. Go read that first.

Theodore Dalrymple begins his critique of modern Islam with a discussion of his experiences in Afganistan. Let’s see what we learn! First, that he seems to support the Shah of Iran. Not gonna touch that one. Second, he writes about his naïve convictions about history that caused him to make vast generalizations. He writes about his broad, hilariously orientalist impressions of Afganistan. “You knew that they would defend you to the death, if necessary—or cut your throat like a chicken’s, if necessary. Honor among them was all.” Really? Even if you hate Edward Said, surely you must see his point when you read this shit? Furthermore, note the focus on his own personal impressions. This will continue through the piece, Friedman-style. Lastly, there’s nothing I hate more than the argument-from-conversion-narrative. His stupidity, ignorance, and quasi-racist urge to generalize about Afganistan and its people caused him to completely misunderstand what he was seeing – but now that he’s “seen the light,” he hasn’t learned anything about nuance, he’s just swapped in a new set of impossibly sweeping assertions.

So, next, onto Islamic oppression of women. Is this bad news? Fuuuuuck yeah. But guess what, it happens all over the world, in different societies, in different forms. His argument is, essentially, “this isn’t purely cultural because the problem isn’t as bad in other ethnic groups from the Punjab, therefore it is a problem with Islam.” So, first off, the Punjabi groups have been separated by religion for centuries, and probably converted along tribal lines to begin with, and then co-religionist tribes began to get closer over time. Second, the nexus between religion, culture, institutions, conservatism, and poverty is a complicated one, and he has nothing useful to say about it. For instance, some extreme practices – e.g. forced marriage to cousins – are traditional ones that stem from tribal culture. Others, like many of the extreme wahabist ones, are radical practices equivalent to American fundamentalism, and are threats to established order in Arab societies. Does he discuss why immigrants to crime-ridden, poverty-stricken cities might cling to one or reach for the other, or might commingle the two? Of course not, that would be too multiculturalist.

To him, Islam is a monoculture and has been since the middle ages, leading him to lines like “is anything intrinsic to Islam—beyond the devout Muslim’s instinctive understanding that secularization, once it starts, is like an unstoppable chain reaction—that renders it unable to adapt itself comfortably to the modern world. . . . I think the answer is yes.”

What does it mean for something to be intrinsic to a religion? Are we talking about things inherent in the text that defy any attempt at reinterpretation? Because there are very few of those. Or are we talking about interpretation, practice, tradition, etc? Those are anything but intrinsic. The core values of Christianity are radical poverty, pacifism, and compassion, and yet it was used to justify crusades, inquisitions, and the gospel of prosperity. The “inherent” values of Islam just don’t matter all that much, what matters is history and interpretation. And yet somehow Dalrymple can discuss the great schisms of Islam and then go on to talk about all of Islam in a single sentence with a straight face.

Actually, wait, let’s zoom in on that a little more. On the one hand, Dalrymple says that Islam has always been the religion of the State, and never had the experience of being underground like Christianity did. But then we have this:

“Compounding this difficulty, the legitimacy of temporal power could always be challenged by those who, citing Muhammad’s spiritual role, claimed greater religious purity or authority; the fanatic in Islam is always at a moral advantage vis-à-vis the moderate. Moreover, Islam—in which the mosque is a meetinghouse, not an institutional church—has no established, anointed ecclesiastical hierarchy to decide such claims authoritatively. With political power constantly liable to challenge from the pious, or the allegedly pious, tyranny becomes the only guarantor of stability, and assassination the only means of reform.”

THIS IS THE FUCKING DYNAMIC OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION. Deinstitutionalization of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Claims of greater piety used to route around traditional hierarchy. He can’t see it because some elements are different, like the focus on overthrowing corrupt temporal regimes, but these differences aren’t just the differences between Islam and Christianity, they’re also differences about the authority of the state and the ability of the people to fight it and the right to self-determination – which is to say, a change of paradigm created by the enlightenment and by Western culture in the time between the 15th century and the present.

BTW, the retrenchment of violent conservative Islam when states fall is not purely a feature of Islam. First, dictatorships that force social change often fail to create lasting cultural effects – look at the rollback of women’s successes in former soviet republics, for instance. Second, the violent anarchy that succeeds many such regimes in Afganistan, Iraq, etc feeds extremists – in the early part of the 20th century, such unrest fed the extreme left as often as the right. Now Marxism is mostly dead, so we just see the rise of religious conservative loons.

Dalrymple's claim that “feminists are silent” about this stuff is perhaps the most obviously incorrect thing in the whole piece. Feminists were screaming bloody murder about women’s rights in the Muslim world back when Dalrymple still believed that the Afghanis were noble savages, and they haven’t shut up since. Meanwhile, Dalrymple wants to talk about “instances of unadulterated female victimhood” to avoid grappling with the massive number of women who are oppressed by Islam but also powerfully invested in it. He describes two girls smoking in burqas at the bus stop and says they want to take the burqa off, but did he ask them? What the fuck does he know about which aspects of their faith and culture are important to them? To say nothing of headscarves. Not all girls whose lives are circumscribed by religion or domineering family are controlled by money and violence, especially in England – most bindings are made of love and faith. I obviously think the world would be a better place if everyone would throw off the tyranny of imaginary beings (though conservative sexual mores and scary patriarchal families are obviously not powered solely by religion even though it serves to reinforce them). However, guess what? It will never happen, and acting like this problem will be solved by some means other than the rise of liberal interpretations of Islam, and immigrant women gaining more power within the religion instead of fleeing it or dying in the attempt, is profoundly short-sighted and ignorant.

“In my experience, devout Muslims expect and demand a freedom to criticize, often with perspicacity, the doctrines and customs of others, while demanding an exaggerated degree of respect and freedom from criticism for their own doctrines and customs.”

Remember, he’s not talking about violent salafis who kill cartoonists here, he’s just talking about everyday normal friendly muslims who happen to be self-righteous jerks. Has he ever met a devout asshole Christian? Maybe he should visit America someday. Dalrymple believes that this Islamic rigidity creates an all-or-nothing condition: either violent authoritarian jihadi misogynist, or drug-dealing gangsta thug on the mean streets of Manchester, with nothing in between.

“What I think these young Muslim prisoners demonstrate is that the rigidity of the traditional code by which their parents live, with its universalist pretensions and emphasis on outward conformity to them, is all or nothing; when it dissolves, it dissolves completely and leaves nothing in its place”

As opposed to other criminals, who retain more of their religious mores when they leave their less-restrictive faiths for a life of crime? Evidence? Anything besides bland assertion? But wait! We soon learn that Dalrymple's real objection is that these young muslim criminals pick and choose only the parts of Islam that benefit them. What he calls having your cake and eating it too,” I call “modern liberal religious practice.” Everyone picks and chooses; to a true fundamentalist all religious people are hypocrites. He’s just upset that poor inner city Muslim youth are assimilating to… the values of England’s poor, crime-ridden inner city. He would like this negative assimilation to be somehow related to intrinsic features of Islam, because otherwise he might have to think about why America has successfully integrated Muslim immigrants while Europe has failed.

In sum, this piece is not just bigoted and smug, but fundamentally stupid and actively counter-productive. The way Islam is going to change for the better is not mass abandonment, but liberalization and reform, and only Dalrymple’s profound historical ignorance prevents him from seeing that. One need only look at Amerian Muslims, a vital asset in counterterrorism, or the Bo-Kaap in Cape Town, to see pious, traditional Islamic communities in Western societies unmarred by fanaticism and violence. Dalrymple, by lumping all of Islam together as an inherently dangerous and threatening belief system, by pushing the Ayaan Hirsi Ali line over e.g. Tariq Ramadan, is doing the Islamists’ work for them. The clash of civilizations crowd doesn’t like Ramadan because he has all sorts of unpleasant conservative Muslim beliefs. Guess what? Religious conservatism is unpleasant, it oppresses women and suppresses free thought, and this is true from the orthodox parasites of Israel to the Christian dominionists of the bible belt. The difference is how these groups express their ideas and flex their power. Conservative Islamic leaders are always going to be dicks; our goal should be to support nonviolent dicks who support internal debate.