Islam and the West

A three-day conference in Vienna on relations between Muslims and non-Muslims is underway in Vienna. The presidents of Afghanistan and Iraq are attending, as is former President Mohammad Khatami of Iran and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. The conference is getting a lot of attention as a bid to open up a dialogue between Islam and the West. So far, it looks like a mixed bag of the usual thing.

Khatemi was silent about his successor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's repeated lust for wiping Israel off the map. Khatemi has elsewhere indicated his disapproval of that sentiment, but lacked the testosterone to get up and say that at this forum. Instead, he turned his wrath to the truly inflammatory rhetoric in the world today, the occasional use of the generic term "crusade" in English.

"Politicians, too, must base their policies on intercultural and inter-religious dialogue. Uttering the words Crusades is not ethical. They must reject this. The person using the word Crusades is a person favoring violence."

Let's see: "Death to America" vs. "We need a global crusade against terrorism." I guess it's easy to see which person is "favoring violence." So much for the moderates in Iran.

Kudos to the foreign minister from the host country, Austria's Ursula Plassnik, for saying what Khatemi wouldn't. "It is not acceptable at all to question the right of existence of another."

Kofi Annan's message, delivered in absentia, focused on the stupidity and misunderstanding of the West, which somehow has come to the absurd conclusion that, because Islamist extremists seek to destroy its cities and kill its people and topple its nations, it somehow has a problem with Islamist extremists. Fie on that, saith Kofi:

The world of Islam is a mosaic which is all too often seen by outsiders as a monolith. Islam's long and proud pluralistic tradition includes modernizers and traditionalists, sufis who seek to synthesize diverse strands of thought and purists who embrace only what they take to be the literal meaning of God's word as revealed in the Holy Quran.

Yet Islam's tenets are frequently distorted and taken out of context, with particular acts or practices being taken to represent or to symbolize the entirety of a complex faith. Some even claim that Islam is incompatible with democracy, or irrevocably hostile to modernity and the rights of women. Stereotypes depict Muslims as opposed to the West, despite a history not only of conflict but also of commerce and cooperation, and of influencing and enriching each other's art and science. ...

Clearly, there is a need to unlearn our collective prejudices; to promote a continuing dialogue among the great religions – a dialogue based on the premise that diversity – in thought, in belief, and in action – is a precious gift, not a threat. We must educate ourselves and our societies to go beyond stereotypes of the other, and to avoid simplistic categorizations that exacerbate misunderstandings and prevent real problems being tackled.

So much for Islam, as for extremism, Kofi buries that in the West's problem:

We must also unite in our efforts to address the extremism that is, alas, on the rise, not only in Islam but among adherents of many faiths. The great religions all contain pluralistic traditions, yet, increasingly, many of their followers are succumbing to exclusivism. The extremist's tendency to divide humanity into mutually exclusive groups or categories, and to treat anyone who tries to cross the dividing lines as a traitor, is one of the greatest threats that we face in the world today. Islam has perhaps suffered the most in this regard. Extremist dogmas have gained ground, impeding the progress and threatening the security of Muslims all over the world.

Which could easily be read literally as a condemnation of Arien Sharon's Judaism or George Bush's Christianity as well as Osama's Islam. Oh, and the way to deal with someone who is trying to kill you and your family? Don't even think about violence. Kofi says, use logic!

We must respond to extremists, but not in kind. If we respond to violence with violence, to anathema with anathema, to exclusion with exclusion, we will be accepting the logic of those we seek to defeat, and thereby helping them win new converts to their ideas.

On the contrary, we must respond to them with our own logic – the logic of peace, of reconciliation, of inclusion and mutual respect. We must resolve, even more firmly, to build nations within which people of different communities can coexist, and enjoy equal rights.

And we must resolve to build a world in which no nation, and no community, will be punished collectively for the crimes of some of its members; a world in which no religion will be demonized for the aberrations of some of its adherents; a world in which there will be no “clash of civilizations”, because people will strive to discover the best in each other's traditions and cultures, and to learn from it.

I'm pleased to say that amid all this nonsense someone beside Plassnik said something sensible at the conference. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani:

"It is incumbent on Muslim theologians — and all Muslim thinkers — to make sure these criminals have no peace and have no room," Talabani told the gathering of religious and political leaders examining Islam's roles in a world of borderless commerce and culture.

... "Terrorism is a scourge that the world is suffering under. ... It will grow if we don't act," he said.

Thank goodness for Iraq, eh?