The Nappy Cat Chronicles

Your train departs here here. Your destination is here.

After numerous false starts, I’ve finally finished Reza Aslan’s No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Fure of Islam. Although I have no desire to review No god but God, it is important to note that if you’re not previously familiar with the ahl’s, al-’s, ha’s, and ta’s that dominate distinctive Middle Eastern names and terms, Aslan’s narrative can be tedious.

Islam has a long history of acquiescing to puritanical oligarchy. Hence, a Muslim individual’s social, political, and interpretive ideology is dominated by the Islamic entity into which he or she borne. This is because Muhammad’s Quran was a made in the moment text and is not an orthodoxical device. It has taken centuries of Islamic scholars, holy men, and wars to achieve the orthodoxic and orthopraxic principles and regulations that dominate the distinctive Islamic sects.

Throughout its history, Islam has been engaged in what I can only describe as a “trying to get it right” cycle. The goal of each cycle is to return Islam to Muhammad’s egalitarian and quasi-socialist ideals. Inevitably, the oligarchical regime that claimed a return to these ideals becomes corrupted by power and violently oppresses all social, politcal, and interpretive dissent. Eventually, the oppressed, through shared anger and intellectual organization, violently revolt and become the new oppressive oligarchical regime. This cycle has been furthered by British and American imperialism and interference. Since the beginning of their occupations, the British and American Judeochristian philosophies and intentions have been considered the corrupting influences. The road to hell that is the present jihad against the West is paved with these “good” intentions.

(A modern example of an American attempt at a “good” intention is epitomized by Dinesh D’Souza’s screed The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. This treatise is an attempt to bridge the Christian-Muslim cultural divide by appealing to the traditionalists of both religions. How this affiliation would truly enforce its intentions is not discussed but I fear that, like its predecessors, its enforcement will further the aforementioned cycle.)

At its core, Islam is a very egalitarian and pluralistic religion that has been perverted and taken to ridiculous extremes. Aslan hopes that the next revolution will instill those democratic ideals that he persuasively argues are at the heart of Muhammad’s visions. Since any real and lasting change can only come from within, the effects of the unfortunate American occupation of Iraq are likely to quash Aslan’s hopes. At least within the foreseeable future. What will happen during the next 500 years of inter- and intra-religious strife is anyone’s guess.

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Fure of Islam paperback edition can be purchased through Amazon for $10.17.

Rod Dreher was among the first to make this time-honored discovery:

2. I no longer implicitly trust governmental institutions, including the military — neither in their honesty nor their competence.

5. I have a far greater appreciation for how rare and fragile liberal democracy is, and a corresponding revulsion at the American assumption that it’s the natural state of mankind. Which is to say, the war has made me rethink my ideas about human nature, and I’m far more pessimistic now than I ever was.

Soon enough, fellow bloggers followed Dreher’s soul train. Daniel Larison:

2. One of my other false beliefs connected to this was that most conservatives were conservatives first and GOP partisans second (if at all), and would therefore be just as outraged by GOP government activism and overreach as they had been in the 1990s. This was the worst sort of naivete on my part, and it was repeatedly shown to be false. To point out that some of the same people who wanted to attack Iraq opposed aggression against Yugoslavia was almost useless–partisans are well aware that they use a double standard, and they have no problem with it. Again, I mistook the attitudes of conservatives whom I knew for what was true for “conservatives” generally–this was just sloppy analysis.

3. Another false belief that I held was that most conservatives were conservative as a result of custom and reflection, with rather more emphasis on the latter, and to discover that most conservatives were such on the basis of little more than visceral dislike of various hate figures was something that took some time to accept.

And the internet’s favorite self-loathing gay man, Andrew Sullivan:

1. I believed that the United States would never violate the Geneva Conventions and that an American president would never authorize torture as a policy. Semantics aside, I have been forced to accept that this has indeed happened, and that the American public, by and large, is fine with it.

2. I believed that there was no doubt that Saddam had stockpiles of WMDs, and that these constituted an active and potential threat to the US, Europe and Israel.

6. I thought that conservative intellectuals would show a modicum of intellectual honesty in grappling with the disaster in Iraq. Most didn’t and haven’t.

You would think this sort of soul searching would devolve into a sort of self-congratulatory and mutual masturbation. (These are the same death-fearing folks who sentenced anyone with a modicum of authentic political insight to the din of “we are the keepers of liberty and truth” pontifications.) Instead, it’s devolved into a archetypal debate regarding which revealed archetypes are most relevant.

Anyone who believes that any sort of federal entity is competent, honest, and efficient needs to learn otherwise before ejaculating their primitive fight over flight jubilations upon the rest of us. Even a skim of a history book will inform the reader that the legitimate philosophical underpinnings of any movement are held in conviction by only a few. The remaining members are in it for money, power, and the self-gratification received by engaging in good ol’ jingoistic nationalist hubris. Your political movement is no different.

“The more things change the more they stay the same.” I’ve heard and read this phrase a few times this week. Although a truism, it’s often used to convey drab moments of revelation and despair. Fortunately, a scarcity of intrinsic personal and social metamorphosis isn’t dreadful. While technology has evolved largely unobstructed, humanity’s survival struggle, personal and cultural expression, status enforcement, and impulse suppression have remain unchanged for thousands of years. Society will forever remain an amalgamation of competing ideologies, identities, and personal sacrifice, on macro and micro levels. This is our shared “human condition.”