Too often the descriptions of contemporary cultural conflicts draw distinctions between a European or Western “openness” and prevalent illiberalism in the Islamic world, marked by the extensive absence of liberal democracies. This observation then turns quickly into a binary discussion of “western” values in contradiction to the presumed underdevelopment of similar perspectives elsewhere. Not surprisingly, on closer scrutiny, the picture is more complex: there are plenty of reformists and democrats in Iran, Turkey or in the Arab world—and these are the dissidents to whom the western press ought to pay more attention (while western anti-imperialists regularly celebrate the most reactionary elements, because of their uncompromising rejectionism and authoritarianism). Meanwhile, the capacity for illiberalism in the heart of the West becomes more evident every day. Via a dogmatic multiculturalism, the liberal left reverts to what was once called “repressive tolerance,” ending up advocating for illiberal measures in the name of a misunderstood liberalism. This is the shape of the dialectic of enlightenment today: (self)-censorship in modern Europe, enlightened debate in Turkey.
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This Sunday’s NYT included an article in the “Week in Review” section poking fun at the term “Islamo-fascism.” The author, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, had a jolly time gloating over the trajectory of the term: ” . . . no phrase has crashed and burned as fast as the president’s most recent entry into the foreign policy lexicon.” It’s an amusing little sneer at presidential rhetoric, the implication being: he doesn’t know what to call it because it’s not really there. It must have made for a great read and lots of hoots over brunch on the Upper West Side. Stolberg’s sniping at rhetoric demonstrates the degradation of journalism: it’s no longer about just the facts, Ma’am, it’s about the terms and the words and the rhetoric. And how journalists report on other journalists. And how the battle to separate news from opinion was lost long ago. Postmodernism has morphed into media liberalism at its most giddy. What a gas. (Of course Stolberg fails to mention that the administration probably backed off from the term due to explicitly political pressure from Islamic pressure groups in the US: Mr. PC multiculturalism goes to Washington.) The problem is, though, that there may really be an enemy out there, as much as the NYT would like to stick its ostrich head somewhere more to its taste. The media that want to see no evil have become complicit with the evil-doers (a term, by the way, which Stolberg picks up, sniffs, and rejects). “Journalism” has dwindled into partisan battle, and since reporting on the miserable lives of those condemned to live and die under Islamo-fascist regimes would probably score no points against the current administration, that suffering is condemned to the black holes of newsprint oblivion. If it doesn’t hurt Bush, it’s just not newsworthy. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso is no Islamophobe. Initially criticized for being slow to comment on the controversy around the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, he was eventually able to muster a stalwart defense of freedom of speech and the right to publish the caricatures. At the same time, he tried to keep lines of dialogue open with the Muslim world: thus a New York Times report of February 15, 2006, culminates with Barroso’s comment that “Islam is part of Europe. . . . We have a very important Islamic heritage.” That’s fine and indicates a nicely capacious understanding of the European cultural legacy. It is in any case more than standard multiculturalism because Barroso simultaneously gave an explicitly positive and ambitious description of a specifically European culture defined against its own repressive past: . . . the European Union’s chief executive said today that Europe had to fight for its core European values, including freedom of speech. “We have to stick very much to these values,” said José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission. “If not, we are accepting fear in this society.” Referring to his youth during a totalitarian regime in Portugal, Mr. Barroso, a former Portuguese prime minister, said in an interview that Europe had to defend its right to have in place a system that allowed the publication of the cartoons. And, as if his point was to draw a line in the sand, or rather, through the Straits of Gibraltar, he reportedly added: He said European society was based on principles that included equality of rights between men and women, freedom of speech and a clear distinction between politics and religion. Where do they not hold? On September 12, Pope Benedict delivered an address at the University of Regensburg entitled “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections.” The first part of the subtitle, “memories,” refers to the start of the speech, Benedict’s recollections of early years in his own academic career in Germany, which then sets the stage for a reflection on the place of theology within the university: that is to say, the relationship between faith and reason. The setting he invokes is one very much of modern universities, but in which theological faculties were still well integrated into the fabric of intellectual life. The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the “whole” of the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. Benedict’s large concern in the address will become the unraveling of this fabric in western culture, but the prose of the passage is worth nothing: he cites the unnamed “colleague” and reports his lack of belief in the existence of God—Benedict presumably thinks otherwise. This small act of citation, with its touch of humor at the outset, leads into another, more serious, which has become the bone of contention in Islamic condemnations of the speech. The head of the Turkish Religious Authority, Ali Bardakoglu, has demanded that Benedict take back his comments and accused him of a “crusader mentality.” The fabled Shiite crescent stretches majestically from Mohammed Khatami’s unctuous propaganda of dialogue to the brutal rejectionism of Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah. The cultural message of the tyrant-as-intellectual is exposed by the latest outbursts of the Islamic fascist. Khatami’s “dialogue of civilizations” means Nasrallah’s anti-western attacks, including a hostility to the Lebanese government reminiscent of earlier fascist extremists’ opposition to the “system” of Weimar Germany. First, Khatami at Harvard. In the meantime, we are learning more about the event and how bad it truly was. The former president used dialogue to deceive, while hiding behind the protection of language difference: he spoke in Farsi, with an English translator. This allowed him to please the crowd in Cambridge without offending his friends back in Teheran. As argued by Amir Taheri, For example, Khatami would speak of khoshunat, which means “roughness,” but the interpreter would translate it into “violence” or even “terror.” Thus, the Harvard audience would think that Khatami admits that there may be terrorism in the realm of Islam – while back in Tehran, he would appear talking only about “roughness” and “coercion.” His responses to questions about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not mention him by name—in Khatami’s Farsi answers. He could therefore seem to distance himself from Ahmadinejad’s positions in English, while in fact affirming them in Farsi. Quite a “dialogical” position!
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