Ross Douthat blames America:
As the world ponders the fate of Egypt after Hosni Mubarak, Americans should ponder this: It’s quite possible that if Mubarak had not ruled Egypt as a dictator for the last 30 years, the World Trade Center would still be standing.
Although I of course disagree with Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat on many things, I actually have both respect and affection for them (or their virtual selves, known to me through years of reading their writing and watching them on blogging heads).
So, I was deeply saddened by Mr. Douthat’s column on Cordoba House. Still, I have always sensed Mr. Douthat’s discomfort with Islam at quite a deep level. I was even more saddened to see Mr. Salam embrace his friend’s column and use his own Muslim background to lend credence to some of the ridiculousness that is surrounding this issue.
Notice to these people who keep speaking of questions that need to be raised about the people behind the Cordoba Project, but who think that Feisal Abdul-Rauf seems somehow radical to them: Feisal Abdul-Rauf and his wife are viewed in the Muslim community as quite progressive, to many Muslims they are viewed as ultra-progressive. If you really want to posit that they are too radical for America than you are arguing that being a practicing believing Muslim is unacceptable in America.
And guess what, most of us don’t care what you think. Contrary to Mr. Douthat’s profoundly disturbing column, we are not waiting for some ignorant (people who literally do not know anything about Islam or Muslims) and bigoted middle america to tell us what is acceptable or what is not for Americans to say or think or believe or do.
As a Muslim and someone from an Irish Catholic background, I heartily endorse Joan Walsh’s takedown of Mr. Douthat’s piece. I’m going to try to stop thinking about Mr. Douthat’s column because the more I think about it the more angry and sad I get.
As-salaamu ‘alaykum
Another take on Douthat’s piece.
As a historical matter, ultra-Orthodox Sunni Islam, with its origins in the Wahhabi and Deobandi schools…
This is just waffle.
Deobandi must be the new genuine Muslim word that people throw around to signal they really knows what he’s talking about. Wahhabi and salafi are so 2003.
Next people are going to start throwing around al-Ghazali and excerpts from “The Incoherence…”
I prefer ibn Rushd’s The Incoherence of “the Incoherence” (تهافت التهافت), if only for the name.
Douthat is a slimy misogynistic creeper and knows nothing about Islam. It is beyond pathetic that he is the best the right side has.
50 years of selection for stupid will do that.
And this is amusing: Where’s the Ground Zero Terror Mosque? 39 Experts Explain!
Nice to read at a site where the comments don’t make the eyeballs bleed – for once.
Has anyone asked where would be an acceptable location? I get the feeling the answer is “Iran” or thereabouts.
A stone’s throw? If Sarah Palin can throw a stone that far, she shouldn’t be running for president. She should be playing quarterback for the Vikings.
If you really want to posit that they are too radical for America than you are arguing that being a practicing believing Muslim is unacceptable in America.
The comments that RD described as radical are political statements and not particularly religious ones, unless you’re going to claim that to be a practicing Muslim, someone has to believe that America is an accessory to 9/11 or waffle about Hamas.
The point, Arwi, is that Abdul-Rauf and Daisy Khan are exactly the type of people that these people who want American Muslims to assimilate should love. They use the term Sufi to describe themselves as a delibertate counterpoint to those evil fundamentalists. They are all about interfaith, all about art and music, etc. The man wrote a book with the title “What’s right with Islam is what’s right with America” for heaven’s sake.
To take such people and say they are not acceptable to you becasue they don’t pass bizarre litmus tests which are apparently Don’t ever criticize America and Condemn whom we want you to condemn on command shows that one is not serious about accepting anyone with any legitimate following in the Muslim community. To classify such issues as merely political and not religious in the context of post 9/11 I don’t think is helpful, although I can see why some might want to draw the distinction.
Now, I have never actually met Abdul-Rauf or Khan. Perhaps my image of them, formed by their public characters and statements, is somehow inaccurate. That’s certainly possible. But they occupy a certain place on the spectrum of the American Muslim community.
I guess maybe people using the arguments that Douthat and Salam are using here would accept someone like Kabbani, who does embrace religious ritual but condemns the whole Muslim community over “political issues” or people like Quililam.
Views on terrorism are a bizarre litmus test?
Really, dunn? Rauf may or may not be the best of the lot as far as imams go, but that does not exempt him from criticism. Criticizing him for his political statements is not the same thing as “arguing that being a practicing believing Muslim is unacceptable in America.”
Why don’t you first check Douthat’s characterization of Rauf’s political statements and see whether they are fair before pouncing on him.
Whatever, Rauf and the rest of his crew are vapid touchy feely progressives but even that is not good enough now. Now he has to jump in to a will-you-condemmathon for Hamas from them first knuckledragger that asks that asks and jump through a whole lot of hoops for the conservative blogosphere. The fact that he has acted as a loyal stooge for the State Department and the FBI doesn’t matter either.
Tec15 is right on the money. These people have made themselves into poster men and women for liberal progressive reform American Islam — now of course right wingers don’t care it’s just a political issue for them… but people who claim to be thoughtful and serious should be ashamed of themselves for playing along or taking this seriously.
“being a practicing believing Muslim is unacceptable in America.”
there is no place the mosque could be built without controversy now. America just spent a trillion dollars and 5000 soljah lives and the WECs still cant build a megachurch in Mecca.
Exempt from criticism? What are you babbling about? I have plenty of criticisms of Abdul-Rauf myself. This has nothing to do with raising “concerns” about whether he gets to open an cultural center or not. Views on terrorism? You’re not sure if Abdul-Rauf supports terrorism? Get serious.
I stand by my comments.
Your comment was “If you really want to posit that they are too radical for America than you are arguing that being a practicing believing Muslim is unacceptable in America.” You made approval of Rauf a “bizarre litmus test” for tolerance of Muslims, and that is what I object to.
Rauf can say what he likes and people can find his comments radical, vapid, creepy, whatever, without ipso facto becoming Muslim-haters.
wallah, arwi….freedom of speech?
Rauf can say what he likes.
He doesn’t have to be some sort of plastic maftoon so the cudlips will love him.
Salam is a maftoon and a gunga.
Douthat is a twodigit that hates women.
and they are the best the right has got, lawl.
how do you square your support of Obama with your use of the word maftoon as an epithet? From what I see, I am a maftoon because I am apologist in your eyes for Christian WECs and I do not make sufficient effort to fight for my rights, but rather I seek to negotiate and build consensus.
(you may well be right. Strategy is not easy… I am well aware that in some ways, MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail could be a critique to my own approach.)
So, I accept your critique’s validity – but I am not persuaded yet that my approach is wrong. Will you also engage in some self-reflection of your tactics? So far you have shielded Obama from all blame or critique. Isn’t this also maftoon behavior?
maftoon- defn –charmed. used to describe a muslim seduced by western culture.
i have raw, naked hero worship for Obama. a different thing entirely.
he may disappoint me….some have.
like….GNXP was my shining city on the hill.
but he has not disappointed me yet. 
then i proudly claim maftoon status. I am indeed “charmed” by “western” culture, only because I believe the things that make western culture “western” (specifically, the UDHR) are universal to all cultures and were in fact formulated initially in Islam by the Qur’an.
so, maftoon with pride.
also, thank you for reminding me about slines. should have read anathem AFTER Baroque, not other way around, that was my mistake. infooverload
Aziz, I don’t get it. “Western” culture started in 1948 and the things that make “western” culture “western” are universal?
So, are you saying there is no such thing as “western” culture, but you are charmed by what people think of as “western” culture?
And the sentence “formulated initially in Islam by the Qur’an” ..what exactly do you mean by this? That these values did not exist before the Qur’an, so they are not found in the Torah or Injil or that “Islam” did not exist before the Qur’an so that was their initial formulation in Islam? You think the values of the UDHR are formulated in the Qur’an? Some, for sure, but not all. And of course the UDHR and the Qur’an have different purposes.
But I agree with you that Shams’ love for Obama doesn’t resonate with her other comments…I enjoy Shams’ comments some of the time but I’ve given up trying to understand all of them.
So, shams, you have raw, naked hero worship for Obama, a man who has rejected Islam and is clearly “charmed” by western culture, but you disdain those who accept Islam and are “charmed” by western culture, is that it?
That could almost make sense if Obama was ignorant of Islam, but I don’t think one can make that argument.
My point is really that “Western” is a meaningless phrase and if we expand it to a hitsorically accurate term, you include all sorts of horrors that make the modern muslim world seem enlightened Utopia in comparison.
so as a matter of pratical denial, most self-dtyled defenders of the West point to relatively recent Western developments – pretty much post 1960s, really – to invoke their treasure superiority. But these are, as I noted, hardly unique to the West.
The values are articulated in Torah and Injil but they were articulted, literally, *in Islam* first in the Qur’an. Centuries of jurisprudence by Islamic civilizations afterwards have of course built upon those broad principles into a workable system of law and tradition upon which Islamic civilizations were founded that did indeed adhere to universal concepts of rights and tolerance – Fatimid Cairo, Andalusia, and arguably latter-day Ottoman Empire before the breakup, as well as post WWI Egypt, Iraq and even Afghanistan prior to the Taliban. All these are examples of putting these values into practice. Unfortunately the muslim world has regressed on these axes, in no small part due to neocolonialism and oil, but now we are getting farther afield into historical ironies.
the bottom line is that the West did not invent the UDHR but the core principles therein have a long history. If we are using tose principles to define “Western” civilization then we have a definition of Western that is so broad as to be useless; basically it includes Islam as well. But the word “maftoon” as used epithetically by the Granada bloggers and Shams here relies on that useless definition. I embrace it to illustrate its vacuity.
Aziz, thanks for the reply. I guess I don’t really agree with you or them….but I’m used to having a lonely perspective. (although on this one I’m pretty sure I’d have some company in finding your own take on the issue a little off.)
AN, i would genuinely like to know the root of your disagreement with my point, though. How about a fresh thread? I presume you take issue with my definition of “the West”. But I also suspect we dont quite disagree as you think we do. At any rate, i encourage you to start a new post and lets explore this further.
i have raw, naked hero worship for Obama. a different thing entirely.
Yes, you too are a “maftoon”.
Aziz, Abu N, see this earlier thread on a similar topic.
My hero worship for Obama is justified so far. He is playing the long game. He sees himself as president of ALL the americans, even the stupid downtrodden cudlips that hate him. He is constrained by THE POSSIBLE in a truly horrific toxic environment that the oligarchs have engineered while stuffing their greedy maws and clinging to power.
And he is a machiavellian pragmatist….he is both subtle and subversive.
And its early times.
Abu, is your main objection to Obama that he rejected al-Islam? can you help me understand that?
Shams, as a politician no that’s not my main objection. As a politician my main objection is that he’s a politician.
However, in some cosmic sense of course my main objection is that he’s rejected al-Islam. If you read the Qur’an, that’s a pretty bad thing to do. And of course we leave the affairs of all individuals to Allah (swt) who is All-Knowing, All-Just, and All-Merciful.
But at least you can see that it’s problematic that you seem to count his rejection of al-Islam in his favor, i.e. you have a harsh opinion of Muslims enchanted by the west but you hero “worship” a kaffir enchanted by the west.
I know the kaffir word will bother some people but I use it accurately, and anyways some of my best friends are kuffar.
abu this thread is long im going to reply on a new post.
ramadan mubarek!
most of us don’t care what you think.
Aye, theres the rub. the great majority of muslims dont really give a shit if christians want to believe in the teh jesus godhead. we just care quite vehemently that christians want to make us believe it too…and indeed…seem to think it is somehow their RIGHT and DUTY to make us.
sadly for them, al-Islam is immunized from xian proselytization as a CSS counter-strat.
the only place they are able to actually proselytize us is in freedom-of-religion America…and they are so fucking furious that it doesn’t even work here.
The thing most of my conservative relatives seem to resent is that while muslims can build mosques here they can’t build churches in Mecca….that is muslims can proselytize in America, while christians cannot proselytize in MENA. Actually we have attempted proselytizing judeoxian democracy in Iraq and afghanistan for nearly a decade with zero success.
the reason for this is that when christianity evolved as a CSS, it evolved proselytization and preaching as a strategy to increase reps. Islam, evolving from both christianity and judaism, evolved anti-proselytization strats. Apostacy punishment, coopting the sacred texts and congregants of the other two abrahamic religions, and outlawing the act of proselytizing.
The Caliphate had freedom of religion of sorts….jews and christians, the people of the book, were citizens. But proselytization by christians was forbidden.
So christians are wired to proselytize ……and muslims are wired to be resistant to proselytization.
That is why we are so unsuccessful at “implanting/proselytizing western style democracy” in MENA. And besides, when we do create representative gov’t there, muslims will vote for shariah when they are empowered to vote.
its always been a war on islam.
an unwinnable war.
@ Arwi, if people find Rauf’s refusal to say how high on being asked to jump “radical, vapid, creepy, whatever,” while not batting an eyelid at oh say Newt Gingrich comparing Muslims to Nazis than they are in fact ipso facto Muslim Haters no matter how much they deny it.
What Rauf says is true. the stupid cudlips don’t get that there will never be peace until they understand that they called the demons down on themselves with their endless meddling and proselytizing.
why should we have to deal with with demons they summoned?
Shams, i would like to ask you nicely and politely to voluntarily stop using the word “cudlips”:. You can still use slines and maftoon and WEC.
if you choose to ignore my request, then there wont be any consequences. I appeal solely to your conscience and our camraderie. Do as you will.
Shams, you need a glossary. I can’t make out half the words you’ve coined, but it reminds me of that horrid book Dune for some reason.
Slines? Maftoons? Cudlips?
wallah Null…you didn’t get that Herbert was a crypto muslim and the Kwisatch Haderch is really an allusion to the Prophet?
I think crypro Muslim is stretching it a bit. I disagree with Null’s assessment of the book as “horrid,” but Herbert’s approach to religion is very ambiguous. Yes, there are plenty of allusions and references to Islam (even a quote from the Qur’an), but there is also a pretty strong suggestion that religion is crafted by humans for the purposes of power and control.
but there is also a pretty strong suggestion that religion is crafted by humans for the purposes of power and control.
but both things are true, brother. faith is both natural and exploitable.
Bene Gesserit line-breeding is a pretty direct allusion to the Line of the Imam, and there is a lot of bedouin influence. its broader than that, Sacred Bough references, etc. But Herbert was a crypto-muslim i think…like Michael Sells.
arabic language is basically a gateway drug for al-Islam….no one escapes.
(see my beloved Luigi Lucca, Genes, Peoples, and Languages)
disagree with Null’s assessment of the book as “horrid,”
Dammit, MWS, we could have been friends.
No i will not. I will not stop talking about IQ and g or the biological basis of behavior either. I will not stop using the term WEC.
okay.
‘slines– baselines from Anathem.
cudlips– the stupid human cattle that bear their throats for the oligarchy’s boot.
maftoon means charmed in arabic…..i use it to mean a muslim pithed by western culture chauvanism….like an uncle tom to blacks, or a gunga to browns….like reihan salam…. or a kapo to jews.
bare their throats. sheesh
Abu…so much fail. Douthat is a ‘flipper’……he flips truths that reveal the true make-up the conservative ‘low-information’ base to be the opposite. Like Dr. Tillers murder. The flip is that liberals force conservatives to be crazy on abortion rights because we won’t help them overturn Roe. Like racism. It is undeniably true that the conservative base is largely racist…..so the Douthats and Salams flip that and call liberals the REAL racists. Ditto the truly nutty fetus=slave meme. It is undeniably true that if women do not have control over our own bodies, we are slaves. Conservatives flip that and the fetuses are the REAL slaves.
Douthat and his ilk just enable the base to be batshit crazy, because they are either too pantswettting scared of their base, or too lazy to educate and reform them.
bk and 
shams are discussing. 
Null,
shams 8:21 am on January 31, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
(user banned at their request)
bk 7:30 pm on January 31, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
not helpful, BK. Let it go.