This morning, shortly before I awoke, I found myself in a remote Muslim community such as the type you'd see depicted on the news or in one of our television programs, in a small desert village with a dusty courtyard. It couldn't have been more stereotyped, but then, it was a dream from my brain, so what else would I expect? Let me say from the outset that this post is not a defense of Islam as a religion or especially of intolerance or terrorism as actions, nor an effort to condemn our own culture and actions, but just an attempt to articulate what I seemed to understand upon waking.
In my dream, I approached one of the men who sat on the ground outside a low building, and we had a frank and open discussion. I can't remember much of the actual conversation, but on waking I am struck with a greater understanding of the conflict between Islam and the west, and particularly my own nation, which practices an imperialism of culture and values greater than any Britain ever practiced politically.
They do not hate us for our freedom, in the way our President understands it. In my dream, I understood that they, too, value free will, and the ability to choose. They may not have been able to exercise it in forming democracy the way that we have, but that isn't what bothers them. Rather, it is the fact that we have elevated it to the status of a god to be obeyed above all others. In our own terms, liberty has become the chief idol to which we bow down in violation of our own first commandment. They view obedience to the will of God, of Allah, as more important than freedom, yet even those of us who believe in God seem to insist on defending the right of others to offend God, and those who don't believe insist that nothing should interfere with their right to choose whatever they wish, so long as there is no serious harm to others in it as they define harm.
I may be naive in this belief, but I imagine that, at the founding of our nation, the concept of freedom and liberty were primarily about our freedom to do what is right. Now I realize that good people can differ considerably on their opinion about what is "right," or about what actions should be taken to further its cause. Still, when we talk about liberty today we seem more focused on what is "best for me," as I define it for myself. This shift in focus has driven our society to stop considering what is right in favor of merely avoiding what is wrong, then defining wrong according to the terms that best fit our desired course of action. Now it may seem as if I'm going afield here, so let me start to circle back. It seemed to me, on waking from my dream, that the issue which Islam would have with us is not merely our disagreement regarding right and wrong, but our insistence that accepting other's own view of right and wrong is the hallmark of civilized society. It isn't just that some people think it's okay to burn the Koran, or use our sexuality for titillation and entertainment, or take advantage of others. It is at least equally our insistence on allowing people to offend in these ways and others, if they wish, without repercussions.
(It seems to me that this is related to my previous post about democracy and faith, somehow.)
So what I realized for the first time, upon waking from my dream, is that their frustration with us is not so much that we are free as with the way we allow our liberty to become a license to perform and tolerate acts that they consider deplorable and depraved. We value liberty more highly than the things they think are more important, and arrogantly insist that they are backward if they do not agree. We insist that they must change the attitudes and values that bring them into conflict with us, without being willing to even examine the things that offend them.
And yet I am still not suggesting that the burden of stopping terrorism committed in the name of Islam, for instance, is in changing who we are. I am still just trying to understand where someone who views it as an acceptable approach might be coming from, knowing that I will never agree with their conclusion. I believe that terrorism committed for any reason is rooted in the control issues I have previously considered.
Closer, but still not finished.
No comments:
Post a Comment