“But why is it that if a Muslim commits murder an entire religion is blamed, if a black person does an entire race is blamed, but as soon as it’s a white male he’s just a random “psycho”? Blaming Islam for the actions of these terrorists is clearly just racism.”
Professor Fincke is right to note that, since the Charlie Hebdo attacks, many commentators have argued that it is racist to blame Islam for attacks committed in its name. As I noted in my last post, the line between anti-religious and racial bigotry is not always easy to draw; two often often go hand in hand (given that racial or ethnic groups often use particular religious traditions as means of establishing and maintaining group identity and solidarity), or one may serve as a mask for the other. Analogies between African-American experience are appropriate here; just as criticism of "Ebonics" (better and more formally known in contemporary scholarly literature as African American Vernacular English) often serves as a mask for anti-black racism, criticism of Islam often serves as a mask for racism against any or all of the various ethnic and national groups originating in predominantly Muslim countries.
That said, it does not seem as clear to me as it does to Professor Fincke, and as it does to many liberal observers, that when a black person commits a crime, his alleged racial characteristics are to blame, but that when a white person commits a crime, her acts are blamed on her individual character or psychological state. An old saw has it that kleptomania is what we call it when a rich person steals things. This saw cuts both ways; it may be used to mean that when rich people steal, society exonerates their actions in ways it does not when poor people steal, or it may be used to mean that the rich are assumed to lack the same level of self-control as the poor. As with class, so too with race--and not surprisingly, as the two have so long been intertwined. It is not uncommon these days for the media and society to blame the supposed inherent racism of whites for crimes that whites commit, rather than their individual moral or psychological inadequacies. The logic here is not entirely different from the belief that blacks (or other people of color) commit crimes because of the "pathologies" of their cultures.
All of that said, Professor Fincke is right to note that we are justified in blaming Islam for terrorism when terrorists cite Islam as the basis for their actions. I can see no good reason to assume that violent acts that perpetrators commit in the name of their faith are "really" about economics, nationalism, or some other force than religion. Nonetheless, I take issue with the notion that the type of religion that cites violence is the "real" Islam (or Christianity, or Hinduism) while versions of the religion that expect their adherents to be peaceable are somehow distorted or watered-down versions of the real things. I have never really understood why atheist thinkers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, who have nothing kind to say about fundamentalist philosophies, are so eager to agree with fundamentalists that the most violent and extreme interpretations of a faith tradition are the "real thing" while progressive religion is something akin to a bad photocopy of it. Moreover, I have never seen what qualifies professed atheists to have an opinion on the matter. As a white person, I do not have a say about what the boundaries of authentic African-American culture are (presuming that authenticity can be established in any culture); this is a discussion African-Americans are entitled to have among themselves, and to interject myself into that discussion would be presumptuous and rude. Religious folk deserve the same respect from people who define themselves as outsiders to their religious traditions.
“No True Muslim Would Be A Terrorist.” Or, its evil cousin, “Muslim terrorists are the true Muslims.”
I dealt with the question of whether there can be "true" and "false" adherents of a particular religious tradition in my last post, and will not repeat those arguments here. I daresay that Professor Finke would object to the idea that there are no true and false liberals, no true and false proponents of racial or gender equality, and no true or false secularists.
What Professor Fincke argues here, however, goes beyond this assertion. He claims that religions are only entitled to evolve in ways that "make for moral improvement rather than moral stagnation or moral regression." All very well and good, but moral improvement and moral regression are both is in the eye of the beholder. And the line between them is not always as neat as Professor Fincke would have us believe. Fincke also chides religious believers for not casting off the shackles of having to justify their evolving moral understandings through reinterpretation of ancient texts. Here too Fincke's understanding of religion suffers from tunnel vision.
The best way to illustrate the problem to take a sample case. As we are discussing Islam, I will take a moral dilemma that pertains both to it and to my own faith tradition, Judaism: the separation of men and women in worship. My knowledge of this topic is mostly from a Jewish perspective, though from a recent viewing of the film Unmosqued, in which the topic of Muslim separation of the sexes at prayer is discussed at length, lead me to believe that in both traditions, the issues raised are similar and that much of what I have to say about this issue in Jewish communities would apply equally to Muslim ones.
Traditionally, Jewish synagogues separated men and women at prayer, and in recent (and not-so-recent--controversy about this required separation has been raging in Jewish communities for over 150 years) times, feminism has forced a re-evaluation of this practice. The issue is complicated by a lack of agreement about the original reasons and intent of separation, or of its purpose and effects in our own time. Would removing the mechitzah (the traditional barrier separating men and women in an Orthodox synagogue), empower women by making it easier for them to participate in the worship service? Or would it dis-empower women, by taking away the opportunity to certain of having a place to pray way from the male gaze, and its tendency to assess women on their dress? Arguments can be, and often are, made either way, by both men and women. Moral progress and moral regression are not always so easily discerned as Fincke would have us believe.
With respect to whether it is better simply to make a great moral leap forward than to seek to square a new moral understanding with ancient texts (or, as Fincke would have it, to force a new moral understanding with the text), the best analogy is to the American constitution. Like the American constitution, a religious tradition seeks to embody an understanding of the cosmos and to promote a system of values. And like American law, it seeks to do so in the context of an ordered community. These facts are easier to see in traditions like Islam and Judaism, which define themselves though law more so than in Christianity, where avoidance of "legalism" has been a goal.
Like the American constitution, the Torah and the Quran were written down--whether as direct dictation from God as fundamentalists would believe, or as the best human approximation of a divine will that is never fully comprehensible, as religious liberals (and I) would believe--by particular people at particular times and places. Parts of these texts are vague and present wiggle room for interpretation; others do not. For example, the Supreme Court has argued endlessly over the limits of the federal government's powers to regulate commerce "among the several states"; it has not argued endlessly over whether states with large populations are entitled to send more senators to the Senate, because the Constitution undeniably says that each state, regardless of population, is entitled to send only two. Even loose constructionists like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor will not argue that California is entitled to more senators than Wyoming, because there simply is no plausible interpretation of the Constitution as we have it that would allow this construction. Does relying on an "ancient text" impede moral progress (as defined by those who see the current law governing the composition of the Senate as undemocratic) in this instance? Perhaps. But the alternative is to invite chaos.
Moreover, Fincke ignores that in my instances, the religiously faithful actually do engage in a kind of radical repair of their religious beliefs that is, in many ways, similar to the way the American people can amend the Constitution in order to further democratic progress. A case in point is the manner in which Jewish law has undergone repair over the centuries to ensure that the balance of power between debtors and creditors does not get too far out of hand in either direction. A specific requirement of the Torah that all debts be cancelled every seven years--a law originally meant to prevent the poor from being locked in a never-ending cycle of debt--was abandoned by rabbinical tradition, not in the interests of the rich, but in the interests of the poor, to ensure that the poor would not be refused loans by lenders who worried that they would not be repaid within seven years. Amendments to specifics of the law of debt have sometimes been justified not on interpretations of the text but on the grounds that they are a necessary tikkun, or repair, of the Law of Moses, necessary to ensure that the entirely of the law does not lose its moral credibility and authority.
Is this system sometimes slow in correcting a real or perceived injustice? Yes. But it also has the blessing of not throwing a community into anarchy. Whether in a nation or a religion, this is a good thing.
