The Death Rattle of the Taliban? Ask the Women...

 Terror Quest is pretty harsh on the fundamentalist practitioners of Islam, and some of the worst characters in the book are members of a Taliban-like group. The group promises a “road to recovery” but instead takes the region into a backward and strict interpretation of holy words.

In fairness, every religion includes hardliners who claim to live by the “original intent” of the Messiah or Prophet or Word of God. Christians can search forever for what Jesus said about hip-hop or rock and roll, but they aren’t going to find anything. But, if we like, we can cast modern practices such as dancing to popular music into the “sinful stuff that’s bad for you” category and condemn certain types of music on those grounds, as is done in Terror Quest.

Today, Christianity, especially in the West, has been through a rigorous secularization process. Christians would see certain behaviors (such as robbing a bank) as crimes that should punished by civil authorities rather than as sins that require the intervention of a minister or priest.

I recently came across an article about Islamic secularization written by Theodore Dalrymple that contains some thoughts on the matter.  He starts by talking about his experiences doing Shakespeare in rural Afghanistan when the Taliban was out of power and says that he assumed that “secularization was an irreversible process, like the breaking of eggs: that once people had seen the glory of life without compulsory obeisance to the men of God, they would never turn back to them as the sole guides to their lives and politics.”

Dalrymple sees the impact of Muslim fundamentalism mainly concerning the choice of husbands for young girls. He found circumstances in places with strict religious guidelines to be similar to the family situation in Romeo and Juliet.

Juliet is told that, as a family asset to be exploited, she is to be married to secure a family relationship. Juliet complains to her mom:

O sweet my mother, cast me not away!

Juliet then threatens suicide, but dad has the final word:

And you be mine, I’ll give you to my friend;
And you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets,
For by my soul, I’ll ne’er acknowledge thee,
Nor what is mine shall ever do thee good.

And that’s pretty clear: do as I say, or go beg on the streets. It’s a family honor thing.

Dalrymple outlines the situation for modern Muslim women under fundamentalist regimes as just as bad: He cites a woman whose “refusal to marry her first cousin, betrothed to her by her father, all unknown to her, in the earliest years of her childhood” results in her killing “because she has impugned family honor by breaking her father’s word.” In others words, an honor killing 500 years after Shakespeare.

Even fleeing to another country like England or the USA is often no protection. Unsuspecting girls are tricked into marriage: a trip home is for a wedding she had no idea was coming. 

But let’s not forget, Christianity had to outgrow this too primitive stage too. Dalrymple quotes Philip II of Spain as saying, “I would rather sacrifice the lives of a hundred thousand people than cease my persecution of heretics.”

This is one reason, Dalrymple says, that many Muslims do not integrate well in other places. “The Muslim immigrants,” he says, “to these areas were not seeking a new way of life when they arrived; they expected to continue their old lives, but more prosperously.”

In other words, the world of Islam, the Dar al-Islam, is a much poorer state than the world of outside countries run by non-Muslim or secular governments, the Dar al-Harb. He points out that the Arab world in the Middle East, minus the oil income, has the same economic size of a low-ranking Fortune 500 company.

I know, as an author, that while Western culture and language is an essential economic step-up for many in that world (see the British movie Limbo for that painful process), few Western books are translated to Arabic each year. This creates a stark either-or situation that many young men, and especially women, cannot take without abandoning family entirely. In the Limbo movie, the older son is a “freedom fighter” in Syria, the mom and dad have fled to Turkey, where dad tries to make a living as a street musical with his oud (he is arrested for it). The younger son is on a remote Scottish island, where he has applied for asylum in the West. It’s a harsh reality: one refugee complains that he had a better cell phone signal on a refugee boat in the middle of the Mediterranean than on this wind-swept isle.

The fact that in Muslim countries there is no church-state separation only makes matters worse. As Dalrymple points out, “Since he was, by Islamic definition, the last prophet of God upon earth, his was a political model whose perfection could not be challenged or questioned without the total abandonment of the pretensions of the entire religion.”

In Islam, religious purity always wins. Even education is not a way out: there is no free inquiry in a university under fundamentalist control. (Again, Christians need not be too smug, as liberal USA universities struggle with many of the same issues.) But knowledge is freely cast aside in this world.

Dalrymple quotes a character in a story by Conan Doyle (the writer of Sherlock Holmes) about the Mahdi, a kind of Muslim deliverer: “But the learning of the faithful is not as the learning of the unbeliever, and it is not fitting that we pry too deeply into the ways of Allah. Some stars have tails . . . and some have not; but what does it profit us to know which are which? For God made them all, and they are very safe in His hands. Therefore . . . be not puffed up by the foolish learning of the West, and understand that there is only one wisdom, which consists in following the will of Allah as His chosen prophet has laid it down for us in this book.’”

Dalrymple sums this all up as an attitude that “devout Muslims expect and demand a freedom to criticize, often with perspicacity, the doctrines and customs of others, while demanding an exaggerated degree of respect and freedom from criticism for their own doctrines and customs.”

Yet, through it all, Dalrymple sees a glimmer of hope. He ends his essay with this:

“Islam in the modern world is weak and brittle, not strong: that accounts for its so frequent shrillness. The…refugees who have flooded into the West are fleeing Islam, not seeking to extend its dominion, as I know from speaking to many in my city. To be sure, fundamentalist Islam will be very dangerous for some time to come, and all of us, after all, live only in the short term; but ultimately the fate of the Church of England awaits it. Its melancholy, withdrawing roar may well (unlike that of the Church of England) be not just long but bloody, but withdraw it will. The fanatics and the bombers do not represent a resurgence of unreformed, fundamentalist Islam, but its death rattle.”

However, I cannot share his optimism, for one simple reason: Dalrymple wrote his essay in 2004, at the start of the Iraq war and the incursion into Afghanistan. I would submit that things have not gotten better as refugees “flee,” but worse. There is no more “Shakespeare in the desert” under the renewed Taliban as far as I can tell.

You can read his whole essay here.

When Islam Breaks Down City Journal 2004 Theodore Dalrymple

https://www.city-journal.org/html/when-islam-breaks-down-12512.html