Diana West ponders why Pope Benedict XVI's words about the possibility of Islamic reform have largely been ignored in the media. Here is her column at Townhall:
Remember when word came down from the Vatican that Pope John Paul II had watched Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" and liked it? The anonymously sourced story sparked a media firestorm around the globe as reporters sought confirmation of the papal equivalent of two thumbs up. "It is as it was," we later learned the pope supposedly said. Which sounded like the perfect biblical movie blurb; but did the pontiff actually utter the words?After some non-clarifying retractions from the Vatican, it was ultimately hard to say for sure -- although not for journalistic want of trying. This natural curiosity stands in striking contrast to the media silence that has met a far more sensational, far more significant report of papal opinion: namely, that Pope Benedict XVI is said to believe that Islam is incapable of reform.
This bombshell dropped out of an early January interview conducted by radio host Hugh Hewitt with the Rev. Joseph D. Fessio, SJ, a friend and former student of the pope. The Rev. Fessio recounted the pope's words on the key problem facing Islamic reform this way: "In the Islamic tradition, God has given His word to Muhammad, but it's an eternal word. It's not Muhammad's word. It's there for eternity the way it is. There's no possibility of adapting it or interpreting it." Fessio continued, elaborating not on how many ratings stars the pope thinks some biopic should get, but rather on the pope's theological assessment of a historically warring religion with a billion-plus followers, some notorious number of whom are now at war with the West. According to his friend, the pope believes there's no way to change Islam because there's no way to reinterpret the Koran -- i.e., change Koranic teachings on infidels, women, polygamy, penal codes and other markers of Islamic law -- in such a way as to propel Islam into happy coexistence with modernity.
As I said, a bombshell. But this is one bombshell that has yet to explode because no one wants to touch it. Hugh Hewitt posted the extraordinary interview online, a couple of blogs picked it up, and Middle East expert Daniel Pipes wrote a short piece taking exception to it, but, as the Asia Times Online columnist Spengler noted (in a column called "When even the pope has to whisper"), "not a single media outlet has taken notice." Posting the Spengler column at The Corner at National Review Online, Rod Dreher wrote: "Spengler is amazed by the silence from the Western media over this remarkable statement attributed to the current pope ... and he suggests that we shrink from acknowledging it because the consequences of the pope being right about this are too horrible to contemplate." Indeed, with one exception, NRO Corner regulars failed to comment on the pope's putative words -- noteworthy, given the magazine's tradition of a Catholic identity...
But despair masked in the wishful silence of studied neglect is the wrong response. That is, if the pope is right and Islam is not reformable along the lines of a Western model, it's not a Western problem -- meaning a problem the West is responsible for fixing. It is perhaps the ultimate Western chauvinism that even considering the failed overhaul of Islam, being beyond Muslim doctrine and beyond our own capabilities, should plunge us -- infidels, non-Muslims, Jeffersonian deists, whatever -- into the abyss. With apologies to Pygmalion via Lerner and Lowe, the question shouldn't be: "Why Can't Islam Be More Like the West?" It should be: "How can the West prevent itself from becoming more like Islam?"...
It seems like the Pope wants to stay under the radar -- else he would have issued an official statement or a Papal Bull; so why all the fuss when he succeeds in staying under the radar?
Rebecca (and all)
Mr. Spencer recently added The Religious Policeman blog to the links at JW. The Religious Policeman had a fascinating observation connected to the Pope's statement.
Yes, says The Religious Policeman, the Pope is right, but look at one of the implications for Muslims going to the Hajj. Given 1.6 billion Muslims, easy air travel, increasing wealth, and decent life expectancy, he says that there could soon be not roughly 2 million pilgrims but roughly 26.7 million . The Religious Policeman puts it, "we simply won't get a crowd the size of half the population of England into an area the size of London's West End, and converging onto stone some pillars in an area the size of Piccadilly Circus. It's just not physically possible."
The Hajj obligation is in the Qur’an. But, says The Religious Policeman, there is no leader who could proclaim a change in the way of performing Hajj. So what will happen next?
He says he doesn’t know, and neither do I. But I wonder if perhaps, just perhaps self-interest might not accomplish what altruism can’t in changing Islam.
His entry is here:
http://muttawa.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_muttawa_archive.html#113665874353826185
"Reformation" of Islam is not possible. It is not possible, as some claim, to simply do away with the Hadith, and especially with the facts of Muhammad's life, as recorded in the Islamically accepted versions, to come up with a sola-scriptura (as a few would-be "reformers" -- the kind made much of in the West, and given all kinds of foundation grants to prove it -- who want to liken themselves, for all the world, to Calvin or Zwingli) Islam. And even if one could, the Qur'an itself, its passages subject to the well-established interpretative principle of "naskh" or abrogation (later passages cancel earlier, contradictory passages), is dangerous enough to the wellbeing of Infidels.
Enlightenment, Les Lumierers, Die Aufklarung, as ibn Warraq points out, is a different and possible matter. It is possible to subject early Islam, and the origins of the Qur'an, to the kind of study that will shake a few mental foundations. It is possible to put steady pressure on Muslim polities so that withint their own countries they constrain Islam, enough to help in the creation -- it takes several generations at least -- a secular class, like that created, over time, in Turkey. But such a secular class should not simply accept its situation as a given, but never let its guard down, never give up on attempting to contain the power of Islam (straining in it scage) within the country, as too many secularist Turks did, and do.
And meanwhile, what about us? What about the Infdiel world? We have four things upon which to concentrate:
1) Constantly working to eliminate any attempts by Muslim states or groups to acquire major weaponry, and any consideration of "how this will play" among the locals affected should not stop, for even one minute, the need to act when the production or acquisition of such weaponry appears otherwise certain.
2) Ending all Muslim migration to the Infidel lands, and refusing, in every way, to yield to Muslim demands for changes in the laws, customs, manners, and understandings, from the right to publish cartoons in Denmark, to the refusal to permit the hijab in the public schools of laic France, to the denial of permitting the application of Shari'a law as the Muslim family law in Ottawa. Preventing the conduct of Da'wa directed at vulnerable and captive populations --whether through those prison programs of Muslim outreach, or the sly apologetics fed unwary and ignorant students, who are so impressed with their "great professors" who are "really great, really completely objective" even while they "offer a new perspective" to those undergraduates exposed to the most insidious MESA-nostrans, intent, whatever it takes, that their young charges do not ever find out the real contents of Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, and never encounter the scholarly works on Islamic Jihad-conquest and the subjugation of non-Muslims, as dhimmis, to rule by Muslim masters.
The many and gorwing number of defectors from Islam, the ones who grew up within Islam, may still associate, as intimates, with Muslim family members (who may not know of the intellectual defection from Islam), can hlep Infidels to understand the brainwashing of Islam, the ways in which Islam manages to maintain its mental grip on its adherents. It is they who will know the sources of division and potential demoralization, know how the appeal fo the non-Muslim world to Muslim doubts, whether that appeal is based on logic, or on embarrassing the Believers into confronting such matters as the personal behavior of Muhammad, and to exploit, as well, the resentment of non-Arab Muslims to Islam as a vehicle for the ideology, within it, of Arab supremacism.
3) Diminishing the "wealth" weapon, a major instrument of Jihad, in several ways:
a) Government-funded projects to support every kind of alternative energy, no longer divided into those of the "left" (solar, wind energy) and "right" (nuclear energy). They are all to be encouraged.
b) Subsidies to mass transit.
c) Encouragement, through constantly-rising gasoline taxes, of fuel efficient cars.
d) Ending all transfers of wealth -- jizyah-payments -- from the Infidel world to the Muslim world. No foreign aid, to payments to every Muslim state that forgot to be born with an OPEC-silver spoon in its mouth. Let them go, hat in hand, to the rich Arab and Muslim states. That will do two things: it will encourage, not intra-Muslim cooperation, but intra-Muslim resentment, even intra-Arab resentment. Resentment of those asking, and never getting what they think they should be given, and resentment of those giving, furious that now they have to shell out for Egypt, for the "Palestinians," for the Pakistanis, for all the others.
e)making it as difficult as possible for the rich Arabs to buy media outlets in the West or otherwise use their unearned wealth as a weapon in Jihad. Requiring registration of all transfer of money from the Muslim world to the Infidel world, and especially, monitoring, and possibly banning, the use of foreign money to support mosques and madrasas within the Infidel lands. Let the local Muslims pay for their own mosques -- or not have them.
4) Constantly expanding the numbers of those who have read about, who have learned about, the contents of Islam, and are better able, therefore,, to persuade others, rather than be tongue-tied when the siren-singers of CAIR or other groups come to speak so sweetly about "the three abrahamic faiths" or "we all believe in the same God" or send out speakers to local schools to give "show-and-tell about Ramadan" (that most convenient point of discussion, since it is to most Infidels a delightfuly exotic -- yet not too exotic (Lent) ritual, and devoid of anything that would seem to threaten. With less ease, Muslims will attempt to tell Infdiels about the wonderful human warmth and unity of the Hajj. But Ramadan is the best bet. Be prepared on every occasion to relate Muslim behavior, in Muslim lands and in Infidel ones, to the tenets and attitudes and atmospherics of Islam.
Were our intelligentsia were de-fictionalized, this would have been common knowledge years ago. They're not, it isn't, and it won't be.
So the question, then, is what fictionalized our discourse in the first place. Or is that subject verboten?
Alarmed asks, "So the question, then, is what fictionalized our discourse in the first place. Or is that subject verboten?"
Do you mean by Spencer? I am hesitant to speak for him. Sometimes conversations get so far afield that someone complains, and then the particpants are asked to take their particular disagreement elsewhere, but usually only those who persist in posting off-topic, offensive, slanderous, or otherwise annoying comments after being asked not to do so are banned.
Or did you mean forbidden by somebody else?
Once upon a time, there was a nice boy called Mohammad, who loved to sit in a cave with all his friends. One day, a friend said "BE NICE" so he went into town and told everyone the news. They were so happy, they sent him on to Yathrib, where he found lots of Jewish friends. Together, they set up a multicultural utopia and lived happily ever after.
What I mean is that, by rule and by practice, their side is allowed to pile on endless bullcrap and it goes unchallenged, nary a peep, while our side may not, can not, and has not spoken against Islam.
What little anti-Dhimmi speech there has been is characterized by self-apology, flinching, obtuseness, and great deference to Islam.
This is a communications dysfunction on a scale heretofore unknown in history. Given that said dysfunction is ushering in the Moslem takeover, is it not then somehow at least remotely in the ultimate extremes of remoteness related to Islam, at least by the thinnest of threads?
MORE MOSLEMS MORE KORANS MORE HADITHS MORE SIRATS MORE ISLAM MORE!!
If we Infidels had the same freedom and effectiveness of speech as the Moslems, the EAD woulda never happened.
Islamophobic pride-
You'd be surprised by how many people actually believed it happened that way.
Most people, if they even know about the Nazis, think they disappeared in the de-Nazification programmes after the war, if they know there was one. But what makes those who know anything at all so osure the Nazis left us? I don't mean that they hid in the jungles or the hills of Paraguay. I mena, where did all the attitudes go? The Nazi lines might have disappeared from common speech, but what about the underlying motivations and hidden-deep assumptions? I argue, for what it's worth, that the counter-Enlightenment Irrationalsits are with us today in the form of Left dhimmi fascism, the same shit, a different pile. Nazis are just one form of fascism, the whole root of it being fascism and not Naziism per se.
We live in a time of overwhelming sentimentality. That in itself is a sign of fascism, believe it or not. Not sentiment, but sentimentality. All this crap is from the Irrationalists of the Revolutions we thought we'd won: the French, American, and Industrial. There is still with us at home, and almost eveywhere abroad, a lingering fascism that is the naturre of life forever until our revolutions broke down the system as it had been. The Irrationalists of the 18th century are alive and well in America and Europe. We, the inheritors of the Revolutions of Rationalism are on the run.
I've increasingly taken the position that Muslims are proxies in a civil war in the West. We have internal counter-revolutionaries who want nothing more or less than the destruction of Modernity, a return to the feudal ages, and who better to help than a horde of suicidally fanatical primitives? Our own are our greatest enemies. How we combat our own is a real problem.
sonofwalker,
One prophetic Manifesto that reveals what you are talking about is the book written by Carlos the Jackal, the infamous agnostic-Communist terrorist of the 1980s who has converted to Islam in a French prison.
As Alexandre Del Valle has written:
It is evident that Islamism, the third totalitarianism after Nazism and Communism, echoes to a definite extent the aspirations of its two predecessors: seizing the struggle of civilizations and religions, then declaring war on the Judeo-Christian world in the name of the “dispossessed” of the rest of the planet, Islamism seduces as much those nostalgic for the pagan Third Reich, resolved to eradicate Judaism and Christianity, as it does those partisans of the hammer and sickle, determined to come to blows with the “bourgeois” and “capitalist” West. The nerve center of this despised system: Manhattan, “the planetary district of mercenaries of the economic and financial war that America wreaks on the world”, according to the words of Carlos [the Jackal].
Carlos embraces a “revolutionary Islamism destined to sweep the world,” an Islamism that “realizes the dynamic synthesis of different currents (the anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist struggle) and draws for its models of action upon socialism, Marxism and nationalism”...
In his recent publication of interviews, the famous pro-Palestinian terrorist explains that “Islam has acquired an irreversible political and revolutionary dimension which, since the dissolution of the Socialist camp, has become the principal force of active transformation for societies and for the anti-imperialist struggle” (24). Already, a little after the anti-American attacks perpetrated in 1998 by al Qaeda in Africa, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez [aka Carlos the Jackal] declared in the journal Jeune Afrique: “The imperialist aggression tries to suppress the expansion of Islam... by attacking Osama bin Laden and trying to decapitate the Wahhabi renewal. But this is at the point of sweeping away the usurpers of Nejd and of the Hejaz and liberating the Holy Places... and Palestine. The attacks [of al Qaeda] are in historical continuity with our own, commenced a quarter of a century ago on earth, sea and in the air against the Zionists”.
[Again, quoting Carlos:] “Osama bin Laden, in standing up to the imperialist Yankees, has become the hero of all the oppressed, whether they be Muslims or not (...) Today, a new internationalism becomes the obligation of all men, powerfully unifying, which fuses the moral ideal and the sacred dimension with the conceptual and theoretical architecture of the social revolutionary movement (...)”
Fr. Fessio clarifies his comments about the Pope in a letter to the Washington Times:
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20060120-091649-2218r.htm
Thanks to Caroline for that letter from Father Fessio. It shows that we should not be jumping the gun here in praising the Pope for his criticism of Islam. Fessio admits
1) he was speaking from memory
2) he was paraphrasing the Pope, not quoting him verbatim
3) his German is not that good (the Pope had been speaking in German)
and,
4) even what he paraphrased from the memory of his "passable but not entirely reliable" German was not wholly accurate!
Like I said before, until I see an ex cathedra Bull from the Pope condemning Islam, don't give me no bull about how he's on our side.
Thanks for the direction on Carlos.
the Pope knows it, Bin laden knows it.. by introducing "Democracy" will destroy Islam because it cannot exist with it... its like infecting the Middle East Muslim arabs with a virus,, will consume them.. that is why the presence of Israel is a threat to muslim arabs.. immans lose control when people enjoy the freedom that "Democracy" brings to a culture! one of the Freedoms we cannot lose is "Freedom of Speech", is the antidote to Islam, communism...
Lulu, democracy in a muslim country means around 25 % of voters vote for extreme islam. The other 75 % don't stand in their way.
Look at recent results in Egypt, Iraq and the Palestian territories.
Unfortunately the neocon notion that everyone loves freedom, is not something that applies to Islam.
I sincerely wish you could prove me wrong.