Saturday, December 23, 2006
The first commenter on this Karen Armstrong apologia at The Guardian has it just right:
Why am I not surprised that at Christmas Time, the Guardian can't pick a better subject to write about then Islam? The only time they are interested in Christianity is when they have something to say about abortion, Richard Dawkins, US Evangelicals, gays becoming priests, child molestation, or Islam. The Guardian left doesn't care one bit for Christianity...you better believe that. Maybe, this Christmas, secularists and athiests should ask themselves why they've lost the respect of most religious people these days...
Robert Spencer ably fisks Armstrong, here: Karen Armstrong discusses the Islamic "tradition of pluralism and appreciation of other religions". An enjoyable read.
Jesus is expropriated as a Muslim prophet, and a central element of the Christian understanding of him -- that he is the Son of God -- is declared illegitimate, and it's the Christians fault:
...For their part, meditating on the affinity that Muslims once felt for their faith, Christians might look into their own past and consider what they might have done to forfeit this respect.
Good grief, apparently Christendom has squandered all that good will it had following 632.
In fact, there is something very basic and vital reflected in this type of thing, if this might be used to launch into a broader set of topics.
This is not about "overly sensitive" or "reactionary" or provincial believers, this is about perfectly sound social and cultural warrants being exercised by publics without fear of being cowed into submission, whether via or de jure pressures, due to social/political and cultural elites exerting undue proscriptive force.
Such pressures reflect, via negation, the enforcement - effectively a kind of "establishment" - of a world view that is not simply secular in a more benign and less presumptive sense. What such coercive forces represent, via their proscriptions and negations of Judeo-Christian tenets - is a denuding and vacating of the public sphere, the public arena. But such a vacating or denuding perforce is not a simple withdrawal or lack of moral/ethical and cultural signifiers; to the contrary it sends the message the a certain vacuum exists - and power, variously exerted, loves such vacuums. We've seen this recently attempted, for example, with the imams in Minneapolis/St. Paul (or wherever it was).
Ergo: the need for positively applied cultural signifiers in public fora, in the public sphere. And if some of those signifiers have a religious lineage or aspect, in addition to the critical cultural significance, that religious aspect need not represent a foreclosing of the cultural content, it doesn't inherently foreclose that signifier from being displayed in public forums.
Too many coal miners' canaries are squawking loud enough for virtually anyone to hear; some of those canaries are squawking from within Israel and the M.E., some within the U.S. and elsewhere, and some are 800-lb canaries. Of course some, in academe and elsewhere, are preemptively strangling the canaries from the outset.