The pragmatic argument

From an article by Mona Charen.

We’ve seen very few Muslim leaders brave enough to denounce the jihadists, and a cottage industry has sprung up in the West to supply books and articles arguing that Islam is by nature violent, cruel, and hopelessly rigid. This interpretation has always seemed shallow to me. I simply cannot imagine that a religion based only on hatred and bloodshed could gain and hold more than a billion adherents over 14 centuries.

I highlight this because of the last sentence. As is obvious to anyone who has read a few of my posts, I am not knowledgible about Islam and have had very little direct contact with it. I am concerned with it, for reasons that are even more obvious - people trying to kill you do gain your attention.

I have read a lot of articles and a few books about Islam for just this reason. Many of them argue, with a persuasiveness reinforced by vivid images of death and destruction, that the problem is Islam itself. While it is evident that there is certainly a problem within Islam, there are two very pragmatic reasons for not condemning the whole, quite apart from the value it must have to those who practice it.

Both are mentioned in Charen's last sentence. More than a billion people, many of them in the neighbourhood, mean that, if the problem is Islam itself, then it is not a problem with a solution. Secondly, those 14 centuries. My materialist reading of history tells me that if anything lasts that long, it must have something going for it. Maybe I can't see that something, but that is my problem.

I agree that this approach is a purely instrumental one in that it doesn't consider the essence of the object of concern, but only what we are capable of doing with it. However, I can't see any way around it. Islam is there; it's not going away; therefore, we must deal with it as if it has a future. Our response to certain of its claims and demands is something I do feel qualified to speak on, and have done so. But that is a problem within Western society (and the topic of the post below is an excellent example of it).

By the way, the article is about an Indonesian singer, Ahmad Dhani, who writes and sings explicitly anti-Jihadi songs and Gus Dur, the leader of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim organization.