The New York Times has an article titled Across Europe, Worries on Islam Spread to Center. It is a string of anecdotes and examples which show that criticism of Islam is now becoming acceptable in non-extremist circles. I am frankly pleased by this. Consider:
Whatever the motivations, "the reality is that views on both sides are becoming more extreme," said Imam Wahid Pedersen, a prominent Dane who is a convert to Islam. "It has become politically correct to attack Islam, and this is making it hard for moderates on both sides to remain reasonable." Mr. Pedersen fears that onetime moderates are baiting Muslims, the very people they say should integrate into Europe.
Attacking Islam, or more generally religion, is important. I am not one who believes that supernaturalism or religiosity will be banished from society, but, over the past 10,000 years with the rise of mass societies organized religion of some form has become a handmaid of the powers that be, and the cordoning off of religious ideas from critical examination was one of the major changes over the last 2,000 years in Western Civilization. Between 1700 and 1800 this consensus was shattered and atheism became a tolerated, if not normative, position. Criticism and analysis of religion is an accepted part of Western culture now, and obviously I support this. Comments from "moderate" Muslims strongly suggest to me that they simply refuse to partake of the bargain that Enlightenment liberalism made with organized religion several centuries ago, believe as you will, but do not expect the state to protect your sensitivities. For example:
Many Europeans, she said, have not been accepting of Muslims, especially since 9/11. On the other hand, she said [a native born Belgian married to a Muslim man], Muslims truly are different culturally: No amount of explanation about free speech could convince her husband that the publication of cartoons lampooning Muhammad in a Danish newspaper was in any way justified.
This is a man married to a Western woman who lives in the West, and he simply can not comprehend why the principle of blasphemy must be banished in a civilized society. I do not doubt that there are many in the Christian community who have the same instinctive feeling about blasphemy, and I have listened to William Donohue of The Catholic League express similar views to many Muslims when it comes to the sanctity of his own particular religious tradition and barring it from ridicule. But while Donohue is an activist outside of the mainstream of American Catholic thought in his positive attitude toward enshrining his own religious sensibilities through the action of governmental fiat, this attitude is common and normative among Muslims. It is the consensus within the Muslim world, and many Muslims who immigrate to the West seem reluctant to give up their values and compromise with the Enlightenment dispensation. Finally:
"I think the time will come," said Amir Shafe, 34, a Pakistani who earns a good living selling clothes at a market in Antwerp. He deplores terrorism and said he himself did not sense hostility in Belgium. But he said, "We are
now thinking of going back to our country
, before that time comes."
It seems that individuals such as the ones above hold to Robert Nozick's formula that the state is simply the means toward mediating capitalist transactions between consenting adults. This individual does not consider Belgium his country from the way he speaks, and he clearly does not hold the values of Belgian society dear enough to shed aspects of his religious worldview to accommodate the Zeitgeist in which he finds himself. This is not abnormal, religious values have a deep and powerful psychological resonance, and certainly the transition toward the acceptance of profaning sacred truths in the public discourse was a difficult one. There are still large expanses of this planet where Islam has a special and cherished role in the polity, where the truths propounded by the Prophet Muhammad are sacrosanct and inviolable. Those who wish to live by such consenses should move to those nations, and leave the lands of the West. It is not like I am of course an innocent bystander in all of this, by the very fact of who I am I blaspheme, by the fact of what I hold dear I blaspheme. Between the rise of Christianity and the destruction of Christendom during the Wars of Religion a skeptical attitude toward religion was banished from the West. This was not a fragile order, or a sentiment kept in place against human nature, banishing those who violate the sacred canons of the tribe, who transgress upon taboo, is an ancient human practice. Christianity and Islam have simply enshrined in their own philosophies this tribal sense of solidarity and line-drawing. The collapse of this order was not effortless or without horror and bloodshed. There is no shame in "political incorrectness" in the interests of preserving the right to inquiry won these past centuries. When idols are placed in the town square one must be free to mock, laugh and dismiss, lest the idol worshippers assume that their wooden gods have dominion over all.
