Ah Yes, I Remember It Well

Speaking of coincidences, this 2018 book was recently brought to my attention by the Algorithm, blessed be its name.  I can borrow the e-book through my library, but I have a large backlog so I've put it on my wishlist and will try to look at it eventually.

Sword and Scimitar is on a familiar, clash-of-civilizations theme, "the often-violent conflict between Islam and the West, shedding a revealing light on current hostilities" as the publisher's blurb puts it:

The West and Islam -- the sword and scimitar -- have clashed since the mid-seventh century, when, according to Muslim tradition, the Roman emperor rejected Prophet Muhammad's order to abandon Christianity and convert to Islam, unleashing a centuries-long jihad on Christendom.

Sword and Scimitar chronicles the decisive battles that arose from this ages-old Islamic jihad, beginning with the first major Islamic attack on Christian land in 636, through the Muslim occupation of nearly three-quarters of Christendom which prompted the Crusades, followed by renewed Muslim conquests by Turks and Tatars, to the European colonization of the Muslim world in the 1800s, when Islam largely went on the retreat -- until its reemergence in recent times.

It's true that the conflict between "the West" and Islam began in the mid-seventh century, because Islam didn't exist until then. So the Islamic jihad couldn't have been "ages-old" in 636.  Were West and East good buddies before?  I'd noticed this sort of vague erasure of history before, in Seven Myths of the Crusades, a collection edited by Alfred J. Andrea and Andrew Holt. published by Hackett in 2015.  It's valid as a corrective to the notion that Muslims had inhabited Palestine from time immemorial, and European Christians were blue meanies who opposed and attacked a religion of peace, but it still leaves a lot of history out.  

My own knowledge of Middle Eastern history is spotty, but I already knew that the region had been a battleground long before Muhammad was a gleam in Allah's eye, and East versus West is a sloppy, anachronistic way to look at it.  East was often at odds with East as far back as historical knowledge goes.  There are glimpses of this in the Hebrew Bible, from the numerous regional wars to the Babylonian conquest of Israel in 586 BCE, followed by the Persian conquest of Babylon in 538.  Persia tried to conquer Greece but failed; then Alexander the Great conquered both Persia and Greece, along with Egypt but also as far east as India. But then he died and his empire fell apart.  West, in the form of Rome, swallowed up not only the East but north Africa and western Europe.  All this happened not by sweet reasonableness but by conquest, with gains and losses at every step.

One Eastern threat to Rome was Judea, which rebelled at least twice, in 66-70 and 132-135 CE, necessitating a great deal of expense in life and treasure to put down.  You've heard of Masada?  That was the last gasp of a jihad by Eastern religious fanatics against Western Rome, though it's not usually framed in those terms.  

Soon after the Roman Empire was Christianized, it came under attack by northern tribes who had no connection to Islam (that was still three centuries in the future) and split into western and eastern regions with different empires and capitals.  In the east, they were menaced by the new Sassanid Empire, est. 224 CE.  Both sides suffered internal strife and external attack until the Sassanids fell to Muslim forces in the mid-7th century.  While all this is peripheral to the Crusades four centuries later, it's part of the background and should be borne in mind.  I don't suppose that Raymond Ibrahim, the author of Sword and Scimitar, or the editors of Seven Myths of the Crusades, are ignorant of it, but they rely on the ignorance of their readers.

I found two books useful for filling in the gaps somewhat.  One was Robert Graves's historical novel Count Belisarius, about a hero of the late Roman Empire - or, if you like, the Byzantine Empire.  Graves was a fairly dry novelist, and Count Belisarius often reads like straight history rather than a novel, but it includes some racy stories about the imperial family, and gives an accurate picture of the period and events.  The other was The War of the Three Gods: Romans, Persians, and the Rise of Islam (Skyhorse, 2014) by Peter Crawford.  Crawford's approach is that of a military historian, and he emphasizes the battles, but he covers the historical background on this key period.  As the subtitle indicates, the conflict was between East and East as much as East and West.

This is not to say that Islam was or is a "religion of peace," only that neither was Roman "paganism" or its Christian successor.  Contrary to some current-day propaganda, Muslim armies didn't put conquered peoples to the sword (or scimitar, whatever) any more than the Romans or other conquering empires did.  (The later English invaders of North America were a different story.)  From what I read, they (either side) would massacre whole populations in cities that refused to surrender, but they needed those populations alive, to produce food and pay tribute.  None of the sides involved in this history comes off well.

Did you notice the reference to "European colonization of the Muslim world in the 1800s"?  European - Christian - conquest and colonization of the Americas, Africa, and non-Muslim Asia may not be directly pertinent to Ibrahim's thesis, but it's not irrelevant and shouldn't be forgotten.  It caused immense loss of life both in crushing initial native resistance and in maintaining imperial control, and it has a lot to do with the Islamist reaction of the twentieth century.  It doesn't justify Islamic violence, but European Christian violence can't be justified either - which won't keep propagandists from trying.

Someone said that all beginnings are political -- meaning, I think, that where you begin a narrative is a decision that shapes what your story will tell.  The same is true of endings, I would think: the Muslims finished off Constantinople's longstanding enemy the Sassanids, but that turned out to be just the beginning of another story. In Ibrahim's case it's easy to see how political his choice of beginning is.  Its ending is yet to come.

Forbidden Desire and Blameless Friendships

I should know better than to write about reviews of books rather than the books themselves, but I've been lazy lately, and since this review irritated me enough to start me writing, I'll go with it.  Remember, though, that I haven't yet read the book in question, and that I'm writing about the review.

So I happened on this review at the Guardian's website, of Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750 by Noel Malcolm, published in December by Oxford University Press.  My beef is primarily with the reviewer, Peter Conrad, who writes as if he's never read a book about gay history before.  While that's true of many people, including gay ones, I expect a little better from a reviewer in a prestigious newspaper.

Evidently the book focuses on the brutal persecution of "the sodomites, as Malcolm grimly insists on calling them," and Conrad says it's all the fault of Christianity as he grimly but pruriently insists on detailing the punishments that our fore-uncles suffered.  "As Malcolm demonstrates, this paranoid bigotry derived from a misreading of scripture. The ungodly city of Sodom is condemned because its inhabitants committed a particularly abominable sin, but the Bible does not specify that this peccadillo was 'male-male sexual intercourse or desire."  Conrad here echoes gay Christian apologetics of the 1960s through the 1990s or so, which argued that the story of Sodom was not about male-to-male buttsex but about violations of hospitality.  This line reached its peak in John Boswell's influential Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago, 1980), which strained mightily to prove that Christianity was not hostile to homosexuality at all.  Boswell was effectively rebutted by numerous gay scholars, but his work remains popular (if largely unread) by gay laymen.  I'll just note that Conrad overlooks the prohibitions of male-to-male sex in Leviticus (18:22 and 20:13), which commands the execution of both partners, and in Romans 1, without referring to Sodom.  He also overlooks the hostility to receptive partners in Greek and Roman antiquity, expressed in heated rhetoric that presaged the ranting of medieval theologians on the subject.  That hostility is often found among gay men today.  While male-to-male sex was clearly common and popular in Roman society, an equally popular way to discredit one's political or other enemies was to accuse them of enjoying sexual passivity.  This let the accuser wallow in elaborate exciting fantasies about other people's practices, as bigots have done ever since.

The persecutions of sodomites weren't as consistent as Conrad implies either.  That doesn't excuse them, but it does indicate that religion wasn't the only or determining factor.  In Florence, for example, moral panics came and went.  According to Michael Rocke's Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford, 1996), authorities realized that draconic punishments made it harder to get convictions, so they changed the penalties to fines. "Sex here seems to be followed, almost automatically, by excruciating death," Conrad writes; well, sometimes, but not always or "automatically."  If the Florentine sex cops were driven by religious fervor, they should have maintained the beheadings and torture.  Conrad even acknowledges this: "The moral panic whipped up by these prosecutions often concealed squalid financial or political motives. A French assault on the secretive Knights Templar in the 14th century used sodomy as an excuse for confiscating their wealth."

Conrad may not be aware of it, but gay scholars have been investigating these matters since at least the 1970s.  In addition to Rocke, I think of a paper in The Gay Academic (ed. Louie Crew, Etc. Publications, 1978, pp. 73-78) on a sodomite hunt in the Netherlands that led to the execution of at least fifty-nine men, plus the harassment and expulsion of many more, in 1730.  Jonathan Ned Katz' Gay American History (Crowell, 1976) has a long documentary section on official violence against gay people. Louis Crompton's Byron and Greek Love (California, 1985) details the public torture and executions of English sodomites in the late 1700s. And so on: these are just off the top of my head.  I imagine Noel Malcolm is aware of his predecessors, even if Peter Conrad isn't.

I look forward to reading Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe, possibly this year; the Kindle edition is reasonably priced, so I intend to buy it soon.  But I found this bit, the end of Conrad's review, off-putting: "Announcing that he has 'come to this subject with no personal investment in it', Malcolm resists the wishful thinking of historians who double as gay activists and back-project 'anachronistic sexual significances' on to blameless friendships between medieval men."  For a moment it was as if I were reading about a publication from the 1970s or earlier, with the author distancing himself from his subject (he's not that way, he's impartial and objective!), as if anyone cared anymore.  Even worse is that bit about "anachronistic sexual significances" and "blameless friendships."  I've written about that before.  Erotic love relations between men are also blameless, and there's nothing anachronistic about wondering if same-sex friends were also erotic partners. The ancient Greeks, for example, were sure that the Iliad's Achilles and Patroclus were erastes and eromenos - though they couldn't agree on which was which.  If anything, gay scholars like Alan Bray and David M. Halperin have done the opposite of what Malcolm says, denying erotic elements in medieval friendships.  So I'll have to see Malcolm's remarks in their context.

I Am the Only Atheist in the Village!

Sometimes I feel self-indulgent for posting about religion -- though why not be self-indulgent, after all? -- but then I remember that a lot of what I criticize is not really religion itself but history and other fact-involved subjects.  For example:

This gem ornamented a thread devoted to mocking the Christian group that petitioned Netflix to cancel Good Omens, a miniseries based on Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's 1990 novel, appearing exclusively on Amazon Prime.

In a way this tweet unknowingly honors Pratchett's own biblical illiteracy.  The Bible was not written by "white dudes."  The Hebrew Bible, known to Christians as the Old Testament, was written by a bunch of "Orientals," as European Christian scholars used to call them.  The New Testament was written partly by "Orientals" and partly by members of the swarthy Mediterranean races.  Neither group was considered white by the nineteenth and twentieth century scientific racists who tried to bar them from immigrating to the United States.  It's doubly ironic given the indignation among liberals
over right-wing claims that Jesus was a white guy.

More seriously, rating a text by the author's skin color, whether positively or negatively, is a paradigm example of racism.  Can't really accuse the biblical writers of bigotry when you've got such a large beam in your own eye.  This is a matter of judgment, but the Bible is an anthology of writings composed over almost a thousand years, and while some of its content is bigoted by any reasonable criterion, some of it opposes bigotry.  As I have often had to lament, my fellow atheists are such a disappointment to me sometimes.

Recently there was a New York Times article on white racism directed at Somali immigrants in Minnesota, which I haven't read yet because I've used up my ration of free articles for this month.  The author tweeted an outtake (not included in the article itself because he didn't have the quotation on tape): "a woman touching me (a black person) and saying 'we didn't love it when black people came, but at least they were christian.'"  It's a weird remark, and not only because the Somali Muslims in question are black, but because Minnesota has a history of racism, including the 1920 lynching of three black men in Duluth.  I presume the woman was talking about African Americans migrating north in the twentieth century, which indeed white racists "didn't love," resisted and fought.  That they were Christian didn't do them any good at all.

Someone, self-described as "a U.S. historian, educator, progressive, biracial," immediately jumped on the quotation:

Unbelievable. And ignorant if she's referring to black people being brought to the United States. They didn't come as Christians--they became Christian by indoctrination and the need for acceptance/survival. Christianity is not a native African belief system.

That's true, though I don't think that the woman was talking about black people being brought to the United States.  It's true that African slaves brought to the Americas "didn't come as Christians": about 10 or 15 percent are estimated to have been Muslims, the rest presumably practitioners of traditional African religions.  It's also true on a narrow literal level that "Christianity is not a native African belief system," but then neither is Islam. Christianity is "native" only in Palestine, Islam in what is now Saudi Arabia.  Like other world religions with a missionary bent, Christianity and Islam spread by trade, migration, proselytization, and conquest. Christianity isn't "native" in Europe, either, though many people, such as Jen, forget that. But Christianity came to Africa in the first Christian century, and spread over much of the continent before the rise of Islam; it's arguably more "native" there, in some sense of the word, than Islam.  (I'm sure this writer has heard of Saint Augustine; quite a few other famous early Church fathers were African.)  Most people, including adherents of traditional polytheism, "become" whatever religion they hold "by indoctrination and the need for acceptance/survival."  That doesn't justify the forced "conversions" of African slaves, but the fact of slavery itself is the greater problem.

The historian Kevin Kruse has been generously correcting right-wing falsifications of history on Twitter lately, providing free entertainment and education to many.  Unfortunately, Dinesh D'Souza and his ilk are not alone in trying to make US history conform to their political fantasies; liberals and progressives, atheists and liberal Christians, aren't innocent either.  The word "native" usually sets off alarms for me when someone uses it carelessly, and this was one more time it did so.

Faithful and True; or, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

While I was working -- well, procrastinating -- on another, still unfinished post, I happened on this tweet:

I’m so glad you at least waited the customary 10 days after a massacre in a mosque to compare Islam to cancer.

It referred to this image:

And referred back to a previous tweet featuring Dawkins' letter to the editor of the London Times, denouncing Cambridge University's rescinding of a fellowship offered to Jordan Peterson, a well-known crank philosopher with arguably racist and sexist views.

I don't think it's accurate to say that Dawkins "compare[d] Islam to cancer."  He was attempting, with his customary tin ear, to draw an analogy.  True, the analogy depended on Islam being bad, but it's not exactly news that Dawkins is hostile to Islam.  Presumably, and I'll return to this, he is equally hostile to all other religions.  The point he was trying to make was something along the lines of "Hate the sin, love the sinner," which is no more convincing from him than it is from Christians.

Let me attempt to disentangle some of the threads of Stupid in Dawkins's tweet. First, bigotry does not necessarily refer to hostility to persons as opposed to their belief systems.  One can be bigoted toward belief systems too, for example by assuming that they are uniform and unchanging, and that all adherents share exactly the same implementations of their system of choice.  I reject Islam, as I reject all belief systems which claim the authority of a god to support their teachings and practices.  But I also recognize that its teachings are internally inconsistent, subject to many (including sectarian) interpretations, and that its adherents vary widely in their observances.  For simplicity's sake, consider the hijab, one of the practices that particularly exercises Dawkins: not all Muslim women wear it, and those who do vary widely in how much they feel God wants them to cover up.  I don't know Dawkins's opinion on this particular issue, but as I've said before, I object to secularist societies which ban the hijab as strongly as I object to societies which require it.  (Should I condemn secularism as a cancer because of its history of intolerance and oppression of, inter alia, women and homosexuals?  By Dawkins's logic, I should.)  A better analogy, though not useful for Dawkins's purposes, might be to "cellular growths" rather than cancer: some are benign, others malignant, some constitute more of a threat to the host than others.

Second, religion is not an "affliction."  Even if it were, we don't blame people with illnesses for their condition.  It is something that happens to them.  The whole point of the medical model is that the patient is a patient, not an agent, with respect to his or her disease.  We don't jail cancer patients, nor do we bomb hospitals to drive the cancer out of them.  Religion is a lifestyle choice, and it's appropriate to criticize morally the choices believers make, though not before we've examined our own.

Sometimes we bomb hospitals for the sheer hell of it, though.  I don't know the basis for Dawkins's claim that Muslims are the principal sufferers from Islam, but Christians and Jews have been doing their best to win that competition for centuries.  As Jimmy Durante used to say, "Everybody wants to get in on the act."  Perhaps Dawkins would acknowledge that Christians are the principal sufferers from Christianity, Jews the principal sufferers from Judaism, Hindus the principal sufferers from Hinduism, and so on, but such acknowledgement wouldn't play as well in a political context that demonizes Islam and Muslims while ignoring the religious component of Christian and Jewish and Hindu offenses.  Indeed, condemning the crimes of a Jewish state is a very serious thoughtcrime in Christian and secularist societies.

Third, and related: the first thing that occurred to me when I read Dawkins's remark about "homosexuals" was "Tell that to Alan Turing!"  Turing, you may recall, was forced by the State to take hormone "therapy" for the crime against Nature of having sex with other males.  Until the early twenty-first century, secularist science in the US was tolerant of secular attempts to "cure" homosexuals, decades after homosexuality was removed from the index of mental disorders and it was widely known that sexual orientation cannot be changed.  It's not clear to me why scientists changed their views on the status of male homosexuality; it doesn't seem to have been because of evidence, because whether a condition is an illness or not is not something that can be settled by evidence. And the whole edifice of psychiatry is of very dubious validity in general.  It reminds me of the way Bob Jones University, which insisted for decades on the Biblical doctrine of racial separation, suddenly awoke one day to discover that there was no such doctrine and they couldn't remember what it was supposed to be.

On women, the record of the "hard sciences" is comparable to that of "religion."  Not only were women regarded by (male, of course) scientists as a lesser breed than men, almost a separate species, but their health issues were largely dismissed.  I've pointed out before that militantly anti-religious scientists are terrible on issues like rape, which they seem incapable of understanding.  But male scientists, not only those of a certain age, still resist with great fierceness allowing women into the labs.  True, this guy is Not All Male Scientists, but he doesn't stand alone, and it's significant that a highly respected newspaper gave him a platform.  And as someone else pointed out, this scientist's claim that "it's not as if they ... build walls to keep women out," is false.  But maybe I should just conclude that scientists are the principal sufferers from science?  If that were so, I might have more sympathy for Dawkins, but it's not so.  Two words: eugenic sterilization.

Perhaps the worst error in Dawkins's analogy between religion and disease is that it's based on the assumption that religion is an external entity, like a radioactive virus, an "affliction" from which human beings "suffer."  Religion is, as an atheist like Dawkins ought to know, a human invention.  If a religion upholds male supremacy, even if all religions uphold male supremacy, a rational thinker should ask why they do so -- especially since Science also does so.  The conviction of female inferiority and the consequent belief that they should live under male tutelage (aka patriarchy) is plastic -- societies, including Muslims ones, vary widely and within themselves on how far women are disadvantaged -- but it's remarkably tenacious.  If it's a precept of many religions, including Science, it must be because male human beings put it there.  This presumption generalizes.

Recently I acquired a copy of a book I've wanted for a long time, a photographic essay about the Naked Festivals in Japan.  It includes some quasi-ethnographic articles about the history and rationale of these festivals, which prompted me to wonder why people decided that the gods wanted young men to strip to loincloths (or less, sometimes) and mass together for a giant game of Keep Away involving various sacred objects.  The visual appeal of such a rite is obvious to a pervert like me, but to the gods...?  At around the same time I saw some discussion of Roman Catholic High Mass.  We know more about the history of this rite rendering service to Yahweh and his Only Begotten Son, but again, people simply invented it in all its complex spectacle or music, costume, scent, and so on.  If one is an atheist, one can hardly claim that it is an expressive of, or compliant, with God's will.  It should be obvious to an atheist (though surprisingly often it's not) that none of the many religious rites or doctrines are the will of any god.  They are the will of the people who perform them.  In many cases, as with the Naked Festival, they are not imposed from above, let alone from outside, but are welcomed by the participants and observers, who not only enjoy the sight of massed naked men in the streets but are deeply moved and edified by it.  Blaming any human practice or belief on "religion" is an act of extreme intellectual and often moral laziness.

One more point, which actually was my starting point for this post.  Someone else commented on this thread:

Dawkins converts more atheists to agnostics than he turns away from faith altogether. Arrogant, dickish, islamophobic. Who would want to co-sign that unless you were one or more of those to begin with?

This annoyed me. I replied:

Any atheist who changes their opinion on atheism because Dawkins is an asshole is a sheep. Certainly can't claim to be an independent thinker. I'm an atheist on the merits, not because of who else is an atheist. If that's your approach, I wouldn't want to co-sign with you either.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think that the truth or falsehood of a claim about the world has anything to do with the personality of the person who makes the claim.  His or her personality may be relevant if he or she tries to make it so, but that can be a distraction, and certainly is here.  I've criticized philosophers before who complained that the New Atheists come across as unpleasant.  (Don't forget that Dawkins himself notoriously whined about the "inexplicable hostility of Mary Midgley's assault" in her review of The Selfish Gene.  "I deplore bad manners as much as anyone...", he complained dishonestly, and also claimed falsely that Midgley hadn't read the the book before she reviewed it.  But all of this only influenced my opinion of Richard Dawkins, not of atheism.

And why, now that I think about it, would Dawkins's obnoxiousness make people abandon atheism for agnosticism?  Is there any actual evidence for the claim anyway?  Someone, I think, doesn't know what these terms mean.  But there's a lot of that going around.

Allah Bless Us, Every One!

A really sweet story turned up on Twitter today: four years ago an English toddler saw a man with a full white beard on the street and called out "Santa!"  The man heard him, gave him some money, and has continued playing the role of Father Christmas ever since: befriending the boy and his family, giving him and his sister presents for Christmas and on their birthdays.

The punch line is that the bearded man is a Muslim accountant named Hussain.  Which of course is not surprising, because Islam no less than Christianity has normative traditions about charity and kindness.  So do Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and probably all religions.  Not everyone is equally charitable, of course, and what makes the story of Alfie and Hussain so charming is that Hussain's response was so gratuitous, so random.  Given the widespread hostility to Muslims in majority-Christian countries, it also took some courage on his part to come knocking on the door of a Christian family he didn't know, and offer kindness.  So the story also has the exemplary function of encouraging people to ignore cultural and religious prejudice, which is also nice.

But I want to Grinch for a moment, because of one Twitter response that was echoed by numerous others:

Makes me sad that this gentleman embodies the spirit of Christmas so much more than many so-called Christians in America - especially our current POTUS. Actions matter more than words.

Awww, that Mooslim is acting like a Christian!  Since kindness and charitable giving are part of Islam, this remark, though well-meant, sums up the sectarian imperialism of many religious believers.  I'm not singling out Christians here: I imagine that many Muslims or Buddhists or Jews would see a case of Christian generosity the same way, as an approximation of their religion by an unbeliever.  No religion or culture has a monopoly on virtue, especially what might be called consensus virtues.  This story is touching because the impulse and action it describes is a human virtue that would delight people even if we'd never invented religion.  And it appears that many non-human animals exhibit similar behavior.

Nor am I persuaded of the supposed wisdom of children, about which another person gushed.  I see no reason to suppose that Alfie saw Hussain's "kindness" -- he saw the beard -- or that he expected Santa to come right back and see him.  But children also may decide that an old lady with a hooked nose and a big chin is a witch, just because of the way she looks.  Come to think of it, so may adults.

What is "the spirit of Christmas," anyway?  It often seems to be equated with charitable giving, which by Christian norms should be a year-round practice, not a seasonal one.  As I've pointed out before, Christians (and not only Christians, I'm sure) are intensely ambivalent about charitable giving, which they often deride as "handouts," degrading to the recipient and unpleasant but spiritually hygienic to the giver.  Maybe that was why Jesus recommended it, I don't know.  I don't see anything in the Nativity legends of the gospels which foregrounds charity: the Three Wise Men, for example, brought gifts to Bethlehem not out of charity but as tribute to the newborn King of the Jews.  Christmas as a Christian feast day is about the ritual commemoration of the birth of the Savior, not about gift-giving or spending time with family, which are common to numerous religions and/or cultures and characterize other holidays.

Of course you can read anything you like into those stories, as with the Bible or other scriptures generally.  But since generosity and kindness, specifically taking pleasure in doing something for other people, are basic human impulses, I dislike to see religious believers of any stripe trying to take monopolistic credit for them.  But there's also that contrasting, inhibiting impulse, the fear of giving too much and having nothing left, the fear of giving charity to someone who doesn't deserve it, the fear also of being rebuffed by a person afraid of being degraded by a "handout," the fear of looking foolish.  The lesson I take from the story of Hussain and Alfie is one of permission.  It's all right to give, it's all right to receive.  Go, and do likewise.

Mnyeh, Typical

Jews Sans Frontieres has several good new posts up, dealing with accusations of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn and his section of the Labour Party.  It happened that I read these a day after a Facebook friend linked to an article warning of newly increased anti-Semitism. These are important and contain valid information and arguments.  But I noticed something that bothered me here.

If you look at the way the Zionist movement is throwing its weight around in the UK ever since Jeremy Corbyn became leader, it's not an edifying spectacle. I mean it must be causing antisemitism given the unjust and unfounded nature of the allegations. 

And here:

Sadly it also has the effect of making ill-informed people subscribe to the old antisemitism because of course Dave [Rich, author of a book accusing the left of anti-Semitism] and others like him, including now a Home Office Select Committee have decided that Jews and Zionists are the same thing.  All very sad and very irresponsible.

I agree that many, probably most people react to the bad behavior of a few people by ascribing it to all members of the group they associate with the bad actors.  So, for example, I captured this specimen a year ago after the Paris attacks, in comments at another blog:

And yet yesterday evening I found myself thinking “what the f*** is wrong with those people”, and I’d be lying if said I meant just the murdering a*******. I should know better. I DO know better. And yet… I don’t know any muslims. It’s so easy to slip into that lazy, wrongheaded thinking, even when you know better. 

Since it's so easy to slip into that lazy, wrongheaded thinking, I think it's important that everybody be vigilant against it, in themselves and others, and challenge it whenever you encounter it.  It's not something that occurs only far away; it happens all around us.

I disagree with JSF and the commenter, though, that this tendency has anything to do with being ill-informed, or knowing any members of the group being demonized.  For one thing, even scholars fall into it: though they are generally very well-informed, they can't or won't apply the knowledge they have.  And contrariwise, anytime someone hears about some bad behavior and asks themselves "What's wrong with those people?", meaning not the specific perpetrators but their country, their religion, their political party, they need to stop and catch themselves.  You don't need to be informed, beyond the knowledge that no group is completely homogeneous.  You don't need to know any Muslims.  The burden of proof, and it's a heavy one, lies on anyone who claims that They are all alike, They are all responsible.  The variety within groups is always enormous.  (Think of the old Jewish proverb Two Jews, three opinions.)

In particular, if someone is angry about what members of the IDF, or settlers in the Occupied Terroritories, or members of ISIS or al-Qaeda have done, and then decides to beat up (or worse) the Jew or Arab or random brown-skinned person in their neighborhood in revenge, the legal penalty should be heavy, but more important, they should be shunned and generally given a hard time by everyone in their neighborhood.  If such a person tries to justify their violence by pointing to crimes committed against the ocean, the penalty should be even stiffer.  If only because such thinking and behavior lessens the safety of everybody in the vicinity, it needs to be nipped in the bud, killed before it spreads.

P.S. I forgot to mention that in a review of Dave Rich's book that JSF quotes approvingly, the reviewer says:

Clearly, insofar as some remarks are antisemitic they need to be confronted. Conspiracy theories, e.g. that Israel founded Isis or that Jews escaped 9/11, should be dismissed out of hand. 

People keep using this word, I do not think it means what they think it means.  Those aren't "conspiracy theories," they're simple falsehoods.  They may be used in conspiracy theories, but that's not quite the same thing.  But the important thing is that Dave Rich and the constituency he's writing for are conspiracy theorists, accusing the British left of deliberately fomenting anti-Semitism in order to bring down Israel.  As I've pointed out before, conspiracy theories are a thoroughly acceptable feature of mainstream political discourse, as long as they name the "right" conspirators.

But do read JSF's new posts.  Though they are about Britain, the same tactics are being used in the US.

I Want a Boy Just Like the Boy That Married Dear Old Mom

The gay men's discussion group I sometimes attend will be taking up the question "Are Gay Men Different from Straight Men?  Why?"  The trouble with any question like this is that it assumes that all gay men are alike, and all straight men are alike.  But in most groups that aren't defined very narrowly by sameness, the differences within the group are greater than the average differences between it and whatever group is being compared to it.  When a group is stigmatized as gay men have been, it is all the harder to build a representative sample; if you limit your sample to openly gay men, then you're not talking about all gay men, and you can't make any assumptions about the closeted.  Some people would distinguish between men who "identify as" gay and men who are homosexually active (the famous Men Who Have Sex with Men) but even the gay-identified vary widely.

In any case, it depends on what traits you're comparing.  Most gay men have penises, for example, probably the same proportion as straight men.  Most of us want to copulate with other males, and we tend to downplay the extent to which many of us want to copulate with females as well.  (In that respect, of course, we're the mirror image of straight men.)  Many of us construct multiple conceptions of what gay men are: sanitized for dealing with heterosexuals, eroticized when we're in gay environments; gender conformist for heterosexual audiences, gender nonconformist for each other.  I expect that stereotypes will rule at the discussion group, as they so often do.

I'm currently working through another book I happened on at the library: Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex, and Intimacy, edited by Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi, published by Beacon Press in 2014.  Some of the contributors are gay, and one of these writes of his first gay friend, who approached him at a gym (page 23):

I certainly wasn't like the other guys there.  I was brown, hairy, and chubby.  I was twice the size of any of the other boys.  Was it my Arabness, my otherness, that intrigued Corey?  Was he fetishizing me, as so many did after 9/11?

September 11, 2001 was several years in the future, so unless he is a prophet I doubt it was on Ramy Eletreby's mind when he met Corey.  But I laughed aloud when I read this passage, because on the previous page he'd written:

Staring at boys at the gym was my treat.  I convinced myself that Allah had provided me with eye candy so I could satisfy my urges without crossing any lines.  The furtive glances I stole at those surfer boys -- white, hairless, perfect -- changing in the locker room was Allah granting me pleasure.  In secret, of course.  I never spoke to anyone.  I felt like a creeper.  And I was.

This is typical of people, including non-white gay men, who complain that they are or might be fetishized by others: they fetishize others quite freely, but you'd better not fetishize them, and they assume that any interest shown in them must be fetishizing, ill-intentioned, oppressive, dehumanizing and degrading.  (A similar common pattern is that you should overlook my lack of conventional hotness and be attracted by my personality, but I have the right to desire you based solely on your surfer/model good looks -- I'm not interested in your personality in the slightest.)  It might be that Eletreby has gotten over himself since then, but nothing in his essay indicates that he has.  I can't even tell whether he is aware of the irony in his complaint.  Self-pity rules his contribution.  Is that what gay men are like?

Incidentally, the editors of Salaam, Love are both female.  Previously they compiled Love, Inshallah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women (Soft Skull Press. 2012), and in the introduction to their newer book they write that Love, Inshallah "resonated with readers around the world.  Including men.  They started to ask 'Where are our stories?'  We dismissed the inquiries with a laugh. 'Please!  Guys don't talk about this stuff.'" (vii).  I was annoyed by this stereotype, which ought to be obviously false -- men have written vast amounts of love poetry, and most of literature is about their feelings and love lives.

But then I wondered why the editors didn't make what seems to me a much more pertinent response: "You want a book?  Fine, do it yourself."  Wanting someone else to bell the cat is of course a common human impulse.  But men have as much access to publication as women do (indeed, several of the contributors to Salaam, Love are already published authors), and one of the primary anti-feminist reflexes is men expecting women to do the emotional and other service work that they ought to do themselves.  (When women comply by telling them how they need to change, another popular reflex is to complain that all women do is focus on the negatives.)  It would have been a salutary project if men had taken it on, for their own instruction and edification, but being good women, Mattu and Masnavi took on the burden.  The results are mostly predictable, with several writers falling back on millennial snark and irony to avoid dealing with their feelings.  The main exception to my mind is Ibrahim Al-Marashi's "The Other Iran-Iraq War," which addresses not only emotions but politics on a level that his fellows miss.  Check out Salaam, Love from the library, and read Al-Marashi's piece; the rest, as far as I'm concerned, can be skipped.

To Lose One Stereotyping Tendency May Be Regarded As Carelessness

John Scalzi wrote a sober, sensible, responsible, "Can't-we-all-get-along?" post about the Paris attacks for his blog.  Specifically, he wrote about Americans' reactions to the Paris attacks, and argued against stereotyping all Muslims because of ISIS' crimes.  As usual, he warned at the outset that he would be monitoring the discussion in the comments; as one would expect in a hot-button topic like this one, there were numerous commenters who tried to test his resolve.

One commenter whose contribution wasn't deleted wrote under the name of Mark.  He announced that he's highly educated ("three postsecondary degrees"!), took numerous courses on Islam and the history of the middle east, and has continued to read about these matters since then.

And yet yesterday evening I found myself thinking “what the f*** is wrong with those people”, and I’d be lying if said I meant just the murdering a*******. I should know better. I DO know better. And yet… I don’t know any muslims. It’s so easy to slip into that lazy, wrongheaded thinking, even when you know better. Hence, this was thought provoking, even though it shouldn’t have been.

How odd.  I lack Mark's great educational advantages — not even one undergraduate degree to my name — but while I did think something like “what the fuck is wrong with those people” when I heard of the Paris attacks, it never occurred to me to mean “all Muslims” by “those people.” I meant the people who did this thing.  I feel the same way about US soldiers who welcomed the chance to kill Hajis in Iraq because 9/11.  Maybe it's because I do know some Muslims; I also know some US veterans of our past several wars.  (It seems strange that Mark apparently never met any while studying middle eastern history at the college level, but I don't know where he studied.)  But I don't really think that's why.  Somewhere along the line I lost that particular stereotyping tendency, I guess.

I'm not claiming any great moral superiority here, because I haven't entirely lost that stereotyping tendency, but I don’t see what is so difficult about recognizing that the misdeeds of some are not necessarily the deeds of all of a group.  Yet many (most?) people do find it, not merely difficult, but impossible to do so.  Mark must know, better than most people, something of the range of cultures and attitudes among Muslims around the world, and that the Paris killers are not representative of all of them. I think that most people are quite capable of this recognition about their own group, though that’s less a sign of rationality than a weasely defensive move, in the mode of #NotAllMen, #AllLivesMatter, and the like. I think it basically accepts the They-All-Do-It stereotype, while still trying to carve out an exception for one’s own side.

And yet I’m also wary of the reflexive NotAllMuslims move, for similar reasons. I recently read a book called Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think by John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, published by Gallup Press in 2008, using international polling data, and while I learned a lot from it, I also was not entirely reassured.  For example, Esposito and Mogahed write:

Forty-six percent of Americans say that the Bible should be “a” source, and 9% believe it should be the “only” source of legislation.

Perhaps even more surprising, 42% of Americans want religious leaders to have a direct role in writing a constitution, while 55% of want them to play no role at all.  These numbers are almost identical to those in Iran [49].

I think there's cause for concern in both cases.  Muslims are no worse as a group than Christians on many issues, but that’s not saying much.  I don’t have any numbers for atheists, but I don’t assume that we’re much better, if at all.  Of course it's unfair to speak of Muslims, or Christians, or atheists, or anyone "as a group."  I don't assume that someone like Noam Chomsky is more representative of atheists than, say, Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins.  It's simple enough, I think, to address the person or persons whose words or actions concern you.

Esposito and Mogahed’s book ought to be read by everyone who generalizes ignorantly about Islam (or Christianity), whether positively or negatively.  It should be read critically, though, and there's a lot to criticize, as when they write that "The majority in the Muslim world see Islam through different eyes – as a moderate, peaceful religion that is central to their self-understanding and their success" (46), and quote "one 20-year-old female engineering student at the University of Jordan" to the effect that "There should be rules and law to respect people of other religions and not make fun of them.  We must endeavor to relay the accurate picture of Islam to the West – showing that Islam is a religion of goodness and love, and not terrorism.  The West must be willing to accept the true picture of Islam and not hold on to the negative picture that serves terrorists" (87).

Most Americans, after all, see America through different eyes: as a moderate, peaceful country whose values are central to its success; and many Americans would advocate rules and law to enforce respect for their nation and their religion.  While the young engineer should be free to advocate laws mandating respect for people of other religions, etc., she doesn't really value freedom of speech or religion.  Disrespect for and mockery of people of other religions is a core aspect of most religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam -- but also the "pagan" religions that many moderns ignorantly believe to have been more tolerant than the Yahwist cults.  I don't believe that the young engineer really wants to "relay the accurate picture of Islam to the West"; I believe she wants a positive propaganda image to be relayed and accepted.  That's not sinister, of course; it's all too human.  Substitute "Christianity" or "America" or "Israel" or "France" for "Islam" in her words, and many would agree with her.  But, like many Christians (or patriotic Americans), I think she would be surprised to find that what she considers an accurate, true, and positive picture would still be open to skepticism and criticism.  As the political philosopher Michael Neumann wrote on this subject:

Respect is not a duty; it is not even desirable in many cases. Where ‘respect’ means not beating people or putting them in jail or driving them from their homes, it is a fine idea. But you shouldn’t do those things even to people you hold in contempt. To call this sort of restraint ‘respect’ is to disguise clear moral values in gummy slush.

With that in mind, let's look at one area the Gallup pollsters explored:

A recent study shows that only 46% of Americans think that “bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians” are “never justified,” while 24% believe these attacks are “often or sometimes justified.”

Contrast this with data taken the same year from some of the largest majority Muslim nations, in which 74% of respondents in Indonesia that terrorist attacks are “never justified”; in Pakistan, that figure is 86%; in Bangladesh, 81%; and in Iran, 80%.

Similarly, 6% of the American public thinks that attacks in which civilians are targets are “completely justified.”  As points of comparison, in both Lebanon and Iran, this figure is 2%, and in Saudi Arabia, it’s 4% ... [Esposito and Mogahed, 95]

I don’t consider any religion to be positive overall, so I reserve the right to criticize Islam just as I criticize Christianity, Judaism, paganism, and atheism. If I actually criticize Islam less often, it’s because I know less about it, and I prefer that my critiques be well-informed.  For well-meaning liberals to swerve to the other extreme, and eulogize Islam as a peaceful, tolerant, moderate "faith," is an overcorrection.  One should always ask: Which Islam? (Or which Christianity / Hinduism / Buddhism / Judaism / Atheism etc.?)  Which Muslims?  In which country and culture?  Are we talking about their words, deployed for public relations and self-esteem purposes, or their actions?  Only then can one begin to talk sensibly.

When Absolutists Collide

The fuss over Ben Carson's remarks against the prospect of a Muslim President, following on the reaction to a frothing Birther bigot at a Donald Trump rally, made me think that people might benefit by knowing -- or remembering -- some history. When John F. Kennedy was running for President in 1960, he had to contend with bigots who claimed that as a Catholic, he would be loyal to the Vatican first, and to America second -- and probably a distant second at that. The only previous Catholic presidential candidate, Alfred Smith, who ran in 1928, "was dogged by claims that he would build a tunnel connecting the White House and the Vatican and would amend the Constitution to make Catholicism the nation’s established religion."  According to this writer:

On Nov. 22, 1963, my home state of Mississippi was, like every other state in the South, solidly Democratic. And yet, according to my American History teacher, who was standing before a class in Columbus that day, when the intercom blared that President John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, had been assassinated in Dallas, her students responded with applause.

Imagine: Americans cheering the death of their own leader. Students whose parents almost certainly identified themselves as Democrats whooping it up that the leader of that party had been killed. My teacher, Judy Morris, was telling that story to another Mississippi classroom nearly 30 years later to illustrate the virulent anti-Catholic hatred that pervaded the South. She said her own grandmother, who given Ms. Morris' age must have been born in the late 1800s, had eventually reached a point where she could be cordial to black people. But the Catholics? No, sir. She could never stand the Catholics. And didn't mind saying it.

This knowledge might be enlightening to Democrats who insist that no President before Obama ever had his patriotism, his religion, or his nationality questioned -- in fact, numerous Presidents have been denounced on those grounds; Franklin Roosevelt, for one.  And impugning the patriotism of one's political opponent is as American as cherry pie.

Some historical knowledge might be also be useful to Americans who are upset by the prospect of Muslim refugees being allowed into the US. Their claims that such refugees will not assimilate are exactly what was said in the United States about Catholics in the 19th century, and about Jews before and after that.  That great advocate of liberty, Thomas Jefferson,

... looking at the Catholic Church in France, wrote, "History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government", and "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own."

I doubt that the Founders would have welcomed -- or even that they foresaw the possibility of -- a Muslim President, or a Catholic one, let alone a black or female one.  Most probably didn't think about the logical outcome of some of the principles they wrote into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  Historically, it's true, the Roman Catholic hierarchy has generally been hostile to modernity, and has been politically active to suppress reforms, but it was ironic for the slaveowner Jefferson to single out Catholicism as the foe of liberty.

Since the 1980s, of course, the most reactionary American Protestants have made common cause with the most reactionary Catholics; no one can say Catholics haven't assimilated.  But there's a problem here, namely the widespread belief that (one's own) religious beliefs must not be criticized, and indeed don't say anything about one: that they are trivial details like skin color, beyond one's control, unchosen and virtually innate.  Other people's beliefs are fair game, of course.  So, for example, as he denounces the fundamental Constitutional principle of religious liberty, Ben Carson stresses the importance of protecting the religious liberty of Christians.

As Daniel Larison wrote about Carson today,

It’s a mistake to view Muslims as a monolithic bloc, and it’s simply wrong–and contrary to the principles of our political system–to insist on subjecting Muslims to a harsher and more demanding standard than that applied to the adherents of any other religion. On top of that, it is self-defeating to insist on the great importance of protecting religious liberty for Christians while declaring in the next breath that members of a religious minority cannot be considered fully American. That is essentially what the Carson campaign has been saying to defend the candidate’s remarks, and that’s a deplorable thing to say.

Christians aren't a monolithic bloc either, though they often like to pretend otherwise.  A Roman Catholic priest, writing at the National Review site last year, complained about remarks by New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who "blithely declared that anyone who is pro-life on the issue of abortion or who is opposed to gay marriage is 'not welcome' in his state of New York."  Father Robert Barron saw this as anti-Catholic rhetoric.  But first, while antigay bigory has long been fostered by Roman Catholic leaders in New York, it isn't exclusive or specific to them: Cuomo was also rhetorically showing the door to all bigots, regardless of their sectarian affiliation.  If Barron felt singled out as a Catholic, maybe he should examine his own prejudices.  Second, Catholics are not monolithic either: many Catholics are pro-choice and pro-gay, indeed many are gay themselves.  As usual in such controversies, Barron hoped his readers would believe that the doctrines and practices of the uppermost levels of the Catholic hierarchy equal Catholicism, and forget that most Catholics neither agree with nor follow them.  Barron himself wants critics to believe that all Catholics have the same beliefs and values, and that they have no choice but to follow them; which is false.  Catholicism, like any other religion, is a lifestyle choice.  Third, it's entertaining to see this protest against religious prejudice published at the website of a magazine which fosters and defends anti-Muslim bigotry.  But that's different, isn't it?  It's always different.

A commenter on Larison's post argued, probably with some accuracy, that Carson "was suggesting a belief widely held among evangelicals that they won’t vote for Muslim candidates, won’t vote for atheists or agnostics, won’t vote for LGBT people, won’t vote for Hindus or Buddhists."  That, of course, is every voter's right, though I think that Carson -- like his fans -- is vague on the distinction, given their inability or refusal to understand what "freedom of religion" means.  They make it pretty clear that they don't believe freedom of religion extends to non-Christians: not only would they not vote for a Muslim, they don't believe a Muslim should be permitted to hold office.  Many Americans believe that it's wrong (for other people) to decline to vote for a candidate because of his or her expressed beliefs, be they religious or political.  (I'm not sure what the valid reasons to vote for someone are.)

People who make the link themselves -- e.g., I'm opposed to same-sex civil marriage because I'm a Christian -- would like you to believe that disagreeing with them constitutes prejudice and persecution.  What is prejudice is assuming that all Christians, or Muslims, or Jews believe the same things.  I've been trying to find something Walter Kaufmann once wrote, that it isn't the advocate of equality who believes that everybody is the same, it's the bigot who believes that all Jews, Muslims, women, gays, blacks are the same.  And this needn't be because of the bigot's religion: he or she chooses to highlight accept and practice those teachings which support his or her bigotry, and to try to drive out co-religionists who don't.

Some Choices Are More Equal Than Others

While I was looking for some discourse about black women's hair the other day, I found this item at Angry Black Woman.  And this comment:

I don’t think that removing the hijab so that people won’t harass you makes you ‘free’. This documentary seems a bit misguided or problematic. Muslim women should be able to wear what they want, hijab or no hijab, but the hijab is not a sign of oppression, PEOPLE are the oppressors. Instead of fixing racism (which it won’t) by removing your Muslim head cover, maybe we should fight a xenophobic nation.

This set my brain to teeming.  I agree that "removing the hijab so that people wont harass you" doesn't equal freedom, and I don't believe that women who wear the hijab should be harassed in countries where Islam isn't the dominant religion.  But the commenter gets sloppy in her third sentence: "The hijab is not a sign of oppression, PEOPLE are the oppressors."  There's a crucial difference between "a sign of oppression" and the identity of the oppressors.  To give an extreme example, there's no contradiction in saying that the pink triangle is a sign of oppression, and that it was imposed by Nazi oppressors.  Of course, now the pink triangle is too often a fashion statement, and the hijab is an ambiguous sign.

But then, women who don't wear the hijab shouldn't be harassed either, whether they're living in a non-Muslim country or a predominantly Muslim one.  And there's the rub, because they too often are.  (There are also "signs of oppression" for men in some Muslim countries: under the Taliban men in Afghanistan were "harassed" for not wearing a beard, for example.  In the sixties, American men who wore their hair too long were subject to attack and forcible haircuts by police in many areas.  Similar abuse occurred in other parts of the Free World.)  Does wearing a headscarf so that people won't harass  you make you 'free'?  Apologists for Islamism have said so.

A couple of days after I saw the comment I quoted, I read about American women travelling to Muslim countries being advised to be more "modest" in dress and demeanor, both as a good-will gesture and to avoid harassment.  (It was probably in Gay Travels in the Muslim World, come to think of it, referring to female Peace Corps volunteers.)  That's fair enough, I suppose, but shouldn't it work both ways?  Shouldn't Muslim women who live in America modify their dress and demeanor to be less "modest," so as not to give offense?  True, the US is supposed to be a pluralist society, but we do have our own quaint customs and gender expectations.  Why shouldn't visitors or immigrants (or American converts to Islam) show courtesy to us and our folkways?  This seems to me very similar to what some Americans have said in my presence (and many more seem to assume): that foreigners coming to America should learn English, because we speak English here; but foreigners in their own countries should learn English to talk to us when we travel there, because English is the dominant world language, especially for business.  The double bind is the same.

Thinking about this sent me back to a review, by the American feminist Christine Stansell, of a book about the resurgence of the veil among Muslim women.  She wrote:

Around the world past and present, women cover their heads before God and man. That is, they veil. A dispassionate list of veils would include nuns' cowls, saris, lace mantillas for Mass, peasant babushkas, brides' veils, church ladies' Sunday hats, the wigs and headscarves of Orthodox Jews, and the headscarf my mother (middle class, Midwestern, Protestant) threw on in the 1950s when she ran across the street to the corner store. All these forms of veiling refer, religiously or secularly, to the old idea that women have something that should be hidden. Call it modesty, or propriety; but at heart it is about the sexual shame that women incur if they reveal themselves in public. In this regard, culture and tradition may be more decisive than religious belief: my mother wore a scarf because "ladies" didn't go bareheaded in public, not because the Apostle Paul told women in the early Church to cover.

But despite all that these many veils share, there is only one kind of veil that is widely seen as a barbaric imposition, and that is the Muslim veil.

Fair enough -- to the point where Stansell deploys the blind passive, "is widely seen as a barbaric imposition."  Widely seen by whom?  A good many feminist writers have mocked the hypocrisy of European and American imperialists who saw "barbarism" only in the way brown-skinned women were treated by their men.  "Western" feminists generally criticized the sexism of their own society first.  They've been attacked by conservatives, as expedient, for either ignoring the oppression of women in other countries, or for trying to make those women over in their own lesbian, baby-killing, sluttish image.  Similarly, "Third World" feminists have routinely been attacked by their countrymen for supposedly borrowing the values of the decadent, man-hating, immodest harridans of the West.  And then there have been incidents like this, in Israel, where ultra-Orthodox men attacked and harassed women who didn't fit their standards of modesty.  (And then, when they drew criticism, whined that their [Jewish] critics were Nazi oppressors.)  If it will make Stansell feel any better, I'll be happy to say that spitting on an eight-year-old girl and calling her a whore, no matter how she's dressed, is barbaric.  So is the misogyny of American men.  (The question I raised about Muslim women also applies to the ultra-Orthodox: If majority values rule, shouldn't ultra-Orthodox women be required to "dress like prostitutes"?)

On the other hand, "barbaric" is a red herring.  Originally it simply meant "foreign," with the added assumption that foreigners are less civilized than one's own country.  I just did a quick search of this blog, and it doesn't appear I've ever used "barbaric" as an epithet; it turns up only where I'm quoting someone else or referring to ethnocentric attitudes about foreigners.  I don't need that word or that concept to oppose unjust social structures and practices.

Stansell also wrote in that review that "American feminists have no problem seeing fundamentalist Christianity as a broad-based movement that harbors lethal views at the edges, but they will bend over backwards to avoid criticisms of radical Islam, even at its most hateful and murderous."  I think this is, at best, an oversimplification of American feminists' views of fundamentalist Christianity, and of their views of fundamentalist Islam.  As I indicated before, American feminists were working with their counterparts in Islamic countries before the September 11 attacks, but they were widely accused of ethnocentrism by conservative men until George W. Bush declared a fatwa against the Taliban, and poor oppressed Muslim women became worthy victims again.  This standard is still being waved under the Obama regime, defending our ongoing war in Afghanistan as a defense of women against the brutal Taliban; that our allies the Northern Alliance are also radical Islamists who commit violence against women is less likely to be admitted.

In 2009, Katha Pollitt wrote of President Obama's speech in Cairo:

You would think the biggest issue for Muslim women is that someone is preventing them from wearing a headscarf: "The US government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it," he said. "I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal." Fair enough, but that woman is choosing. What about Saudi or Iranian women, who are forced by law to cover? Obama noted that countries where women are well educated tend to be more prosperous and promised American aid for women's literacy and microloans. These are both good things, especially in desperately poor and underdeveloped countries like Afghanistan; but face it, to become full participants in modern societies women need more than a grade school education and a sewing machine. They need their rights.

What I'm trying to do here is not to declare one side or another the bad guys, but to stress the complications and contradictions of these issues.  Following Noam Chomsky and Martin Luther King Jr., I hold that the faults and crimes of my own country should get my first attention; but that doesn't mean I shouldn't also notice the faults and crimes of other countries too.  And what if the crimes of other cultures come here?  When the Tonton Macoute visited American shores and assaulted Haitian refugees, should I have withheld judgment on the ground that it's their culture and I can't judge because American crimes are as bad or worse?  I don't equate the hijab with death squads, but I don't think I'm obliged to respect Islam any more than I respect Christianity or Judaism.

As for moves to ban the headscarf in various places, I have mixed feelings about them.  On the one hand, they are a restriction on religious freedom, and I object to that on principle.  But then I read about a television debate where a French Muslim teenager said she supported the headscarf ban, because without it her family would force her to wear one. Of course apologists for the headscarf might argue that she doesn't want to wear it because she's been influenced by her peers, and that might be true, but it's irrelevant. (Such an apologist should tread carefully though, because the usual next step is to vilify the peers and the host culture for immodest and decadent values.) When she grows up, she might decide she likes her parents' values after all and put on a scarf. Till then, however, it should be her choice.

Which is why it's a mistake to invoke individual choice in controversies like these.  It isn't always the women themselves who want to wear a scarf, but their families and their communities who want to make them do it. This is ironic for families that have come to the West to escape certain values in their home countries that they consider oppressive, but more important is that individual choice isn't really the issue: it's the right of certain members of a group -- usually but not always older males -- to make choices for the others.  The recent ruckus over a Federal requirement that employers include contraception in their health care coverage is an example of this: the objections overwhelmingly came not from lay Christians but from senior clergy, who demanded the authority to deny access to contraception to Catholic and non-Catholic employees alike.  Another example would be the exemptions from educational requirements that Amish communities in the US enjoy: it's not a protection of the rights of the kids, but of their parents and their religious superiors.  Such community leaders may pay lip service to the American value of individual choice, but they're really hiding behind it.  Individual choice, for women or men, is the last thing they want.

There is no need for a pluralistic society to respect the wish of religious or ethnic leaders to impose their will on those they want to control,  no contradiction of the general commitment to diversity.  The limits on parental rights are controversial, but they aren't written in stone either.  Parents don't have unlimited power over their children, nor should they.  And it's disingenuous to present the controversy over the hijab as a dispute over individual rights and choices, either in the West or in Muslim societies.

Pray for Us, St. Foucault

I've begun reading a book called Gay Travels in the Muslim World, edited by Michael T. Luongo and published by Harrington Park Press in 2007.  Band of Thebes mentioned it when commemorating Luongo's birthday, and my curiosity was piqued.  Right now I'm in the first selection, "It All Began with Mamadou," by Jay Davidson, based on his experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mauritania in 2002 and 2003.  Davidson must be my age or a little older, since he was in his early fifties when he joined.  He apparently spent most of his adult life in San Francisco, which may explain why he has so little understanding of the complexity of eroticism between males.  For example:

I have heard people say, "We don't have homosexuals in Mauritania."  Most Americans laugh at what they perceive to be such a naive and absurd statement.  After all, we know about the distribution of gay people in our own culture, and we conclude that there is a worldwide population of a given percentage of "homosexuals" in every society.  But I have come to understand that the statement "We don't have homosexuals in Mauritania" means something else altogether to the people who say it.  Western television and movies are widely available in and watched here.  Via these media, Mauritanians see American and European gay people demonstrating in the streets for their equality, petitioning their government for the right to marry, leaving their extended families, and setting up house together so they can live independently as a couple.  That is what "being gay" looks like to people there.  When homosexuality is portrayed in those terms, the Mauritanians are right -- they don't have (those kind of) gay people here!  By contrast, men having sex with men -- a critical part of the Western definition of being gay -- well, that is something totally different! ...

It is instructive to understand the translation from the Arabic of the first question people ask when they meet: "Who are you from?"  Note that they are not asking where, which would be just the name of a village or town, but who.  People's identity and sense of solidarity stems from the tribe, the family, the home.  They take great pride in these connections.  It would be antithetical to demonstrate in the streets in order to shine a light on the fact that they belong to a different class of people.  Doing so would alienate them from the people on whom they are most dependent [8].

Le sigh.  Where to begin?  Well, first, the claim that "We don't have homosexuals in X" long predates a gay movement that turned up in media for export: Samuel R. Delany wrote, I think in his autobiography, about a sexual affair he had in the mid-1960s with an African man who assured him that there were no homosexuals in his country, though he also claimed to have had sex with many men there.  Whatever this man meant, he didn't mean "We don't have gay pride parades and gay rights demonstrations back home," because we didn't have them in the US either in those days.  Similar declarations were made about the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union, as I recall.

Davidson's remarks imply a sophisticated and very American social constructionist consciousness about sexuality among his Mauritanian acquaintances, which isn't evident from his report in any other area.  (Not that Davidson has a very sophisticated understanding of social construction either.  Like so many Westerners, he's probably just projecting.)  I imagine that there are local terms for men who copulate with other men, but Davidson doesn't seem to have spent enough time in Mauritania to pick them up.  His linguistic competence was in French, not Arabic or indigenous languages. Compare this passage from gay anthropologist Rudolf Pell Gaudio's account of gayish life in Nigeria:

Though it has become commonplace among anthropologists of sexuality to refrain from using terms from a colonial language (English, French, Dutch, etc.) to describe the identities and practices of people who speak other (usually non-European) languages, scholars have paid little attention to translation that operates in the other direction. The Hausa-language newspaper Kakaki, for example, had no trouble reporting on President Clinton’s ill-fated proposal in 1993 to permit gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the US armed forces, though the term the newspaper used for “gay men,” `yan ludu [literally, “sons of Lot”] conveys a negative moral judgment akin to English “sodomites.” `Yan madigo, the term used for “lesbians,” has more neutral connotations. Such translations occur in day-to-day conversations as well. In talking with Hausa friends I frequently found myself using terms like harka and dan daudu to describe gay life in the USA. I also heard such terms applied to me.

For that matter, it's a serious mistake to suppose that most American gay people protest or demonstrate for their rights.  It wouldn't be surprising if foreigners watching American TV got a skewed picture of American gay life, but Davidson should know better.

As for family, that too is a distortion.  Americans may not ask "Who are you from?" but we're just as interested in people's families, though this has faded somewhat as we became more urbanized and mobile.  I expect it will fade elsewhere in the world as urbanization takes over other countries.  But when new workers from the area immediately around Bloomington came to work as Indiana University staff during my years there, they'd be asked who their relations were, and the questioning was persistent and detailed.

American gay people formed ghetto communities because our families rejected us, not because we rejected them.  But the attempt to rebuild the burned bridges between ourselves and our families began right after Stonewall.  Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays began when Jeanne Manford, the mother of gay militant Morty Manford, marched with her son in the third New York Pride March in 1972; the first meetings of the new organization were held the following year.  Nowadays it's up to the parents of LGBT people whether they want to be part of their children's lives or not, and many do.  Marriage and setting up a household don't necessarily entail separating from one's family, either.  Usually it's only one spouse who leaves their family to live with the family of the other spouse, a separation that can be quite painful.  But even in the US it's common for married children to live near their parents, despite our tradition of mobility; I see no reason to suppose that gay couples intend to be any different if they can manage it.  Again, it's likely that through exported media presentations and antigay propaganda from within other countries, many foreigners will form an inaccurate picture of this aspect of American gay life, but Davidson should know better.

He also talks about what he sees as the greater "fluidity" of gay life in Mauritania, because he found that so many of the men he met still expected to marry and sire children.  I suppose that's "fluidity" of a sort, but it doesn't seem so different from the US.  It occurs in a social context where, as Davidson says, everyone is expected to marry and reproduce, and a gay man of Davidson's age should be able to remember when conditions were very similar in the US.  It may be that the size of this country and our traditions of mobility and land theft gave people more leeway to resist family pressure to marry -- you could always light out for the territory -- but even now, when people (especially straight women) around the world are voting with their feet against marriage, its romance and prestige are still very powerful.

The number of people who were exclusively homosexual was a small minority when Kinsey did his research in the 1930s and 1940s, while a far greater number had varying degrees of homosexual and heterosexual experience.  It may be that the development of gay communities and reification of gay identity since then has increased the proportion of gay people with no heterosexual experience or aspirations, but there still seem to be plenty of people who copulate with their own sex without thinking of themselves as homosexual.  Davidson mentions one Mauritanian who introduced himself in French as bisexuel, which reminds me that despite all the lip service to Kinsey, many gay people quite fiercely resist admitting the possibility of bisexuality: if a man has sex with another man and enjoys it, that means he's gay, and if he persists in enjoying sex with women also, he's a self-deceiving closet case.  (This is suspiciously close to the antigay concept of homosexuality-as-contagion: taste of the forbidden fruit only once, and you'll be enslaved to it for life, unless Jesus intervenes.  Which he never does.)

Davidson tells how, after watching a European gay-marriage demonstration on television, one of his students said, "If I had a gay brother, I would have to accept him.  He is my family.  And I could not let anyone say anything against him because he is my brother and I would have to protect him" (10).  That's good to hear, and it might be true as well as sincere, but would he accept a gay brother's partner as part of the family?

As I write this I'm slightly past the halfway point of Gay Travels in the Muslim World, and I've noticed that most of the Euro-American writers get all worked up and giggly over the fact that men in many countries can be very physically affectionate. Seeing two men holding hands especially excites them.  Davidson sets the tone: "We learned that this, of course, does not necessarily signal their sexuality.  One of my favorite sights remains that of two soldiers, uniformed, walking down the street holding hands.  An army of lovers cannot fail!" (3).  But they aren't lovers, that's just it.  Despite these (and other) writers' lip service to the idea that two men holding hands aren't necessarily gay, they don't seem to believe it.  I also enjoy seeing men holding hands with each other, and I like interacting with men from cultures where such touching is acceptable, because I don't see all affection as erotic.  Holding hands or cuddling with another man can be an end in itself, not just foreplay.

I get the impression that many Americans like to believe that people from other cultures are radically different from us.  It distances and exoticizes them; it's the flip side of believing that everybody is essentially the same, deep down.  But the differences that Davidson considers so radically extensive don't seem to be, since many of them constituted American culture until fairly recently.  And what annoys me most is that this exoticizing of Muslim cultures gets in the way of telling the stories these writers ostensibly set out to write.

You Can't Sow a Million Seeds Without Reaping One Potato ...

... And even Andrew Sullivan makes sense now and then. He posted this blistering rejoinder to Juan Williams's vicious remarks on FOX:

"Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous," - Juan Williams.

No, Juan, what you just described is the working definition of bigotry.

What if someone said that they saw a black man walking down the street in classic thug get-up. Would a white person be a bigot of he assumed he was going to mug him? What percentage of traditionally garbed Muslims - I assume wearing a covered veil or some other indicator and being of darker skin - have committed acts of terror? And, of course, the 9/11 mass-murderers were in everyday attire, to blend in. So was the Christmas Day undie-bomber. The Fort Hood murderer was in US military uniform, for Pete's sake.

The literal defense of anti-Muslim bigotry on Fox is becoming endemic. It's disgusting.

Glenn Greenwald also weighed in. Like Greenwald, I don't think Williams should have been fired by NPR for saying these things -- NPR has its own blind spots on the Middle East after all. I just think he should be shunned for life by all decent human beings. Or as Tom Carson once wrote in another context, someone should hire a mimic to follow him around and say "You're dethspicable" in the voice of Daffy Duck every time he opens his mouth.