Wealth, Power, and Femininity_
Edited by Mamadou Diouf and Mara A. Leichtman
Palgrave Macmillan (2009)
http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=299503
On May 4, 9:40 am, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoch...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Mensah, that's a good question to pose to Abdul. I hope he doesn't come back
> with the tired, insulting, Mazruist rhetoric of Arab slavery and violence
> against Africans being of the benign, integrationist type. He claims to be a
> student of history, but where does that history start? From the Crusades?
> From Alexander the Great? From Rome? From the 15th century period of
> European (Christian) imperial ascendance? From the beginning of Islam in 7th
> century Arabia? From the beginning of Islamic imperialism represented in
> succession by several Islamic Caliphates/empires in the Middle East and
> South Asia? From the brutally imperious Ottomon Islamic Empire? Where do we
> start the accounting in order to locate the original sin, offense, or
> provocation? This simplistic, politically correct and lazily repeated canard
> about originary Western provocation justifying or explaining Muslim
> terroristic response is both ahistorical and reductive. And since Abdul
> brought up the subject of Muslim and African victimhood, let me say that:
>
> 1. The imperial, "terroristic" (to stay faithful to Abdul's semantic
> template) expansion of Islam from the Arabian peninsula into North and
> Northwest Africa victimized millions of Africans--Christians and
> traditionalists.
>
> 2. The successive Caliphates, beginning with the Umayyads, brutalized and
> victimized peoples of many races and religions in Africa, Asia, and Eurasia
> BEFORE the often cited age of European imperial ascendance in the 15th
> Century. In other words, Arabo-Islamic imperial "terrorism" could be read as
> having provoked the age of Western imperial "terrorism" if we adopt this
> simplistic and pedestrian explanatory model of equating chronology with
> causality.
>
> 3. The Ottoman Empire, the most powerful, longest lasting, and biggest
> Islamic empire of them all was a brutal machine of mass murder, imperial
> "terrorism" forced conversions, genocide, and in some cases, and wanton
> decimation. The victims of the Ottoman Empire's imperial violence (or
> terrorism) included Africans--both Muslim and Christian, Europeans,
> Christians, Muslims, Arabs, Persians, Indians, etc. All empires--Christian,
> Muslim, secular--have victims. You can't have empires without victims. On
> the one hand folks like Abdul want to rave about the glorious achievements
> of the medieval "global" Muslim empires but they won't even acknowledge the
> multi-racial and multi-religious victims and victimhoods produced by those
> imperial accomplishments, preferring instead to construct a simplistic
> narrative of European imperials as villains and Muslim victims. It is the
> intellectual equivalent of eating your cake and wanting to have it too.
>
> My point is this: A rhetoric that justifies or explains the terrorist
> activities of Muslim extremists in the present by simply referencing the
> terrorist imperial activities of Westerners is at best incomplete and at
> worst an ahistorical and dishonest refusal to acknowledge other originary
> terrorisms perpetrated by Islamic imperial formations--which, like Western
> imperial terrorism, victimized a diverse group of peoples, races, and
> religions. To the extant that we cannot justify or explain the Crusades and
> subsequent European imperial adventures as having been simply a response to
> or a "fight back" against prior Islamic imperial adventures, this banal
> rhetoric of political correctness and of refusing to properly name and
> delegitimize Islamist terrorism is void. Bottom line: it is an unhelpful,
> dead-end exercise that illuminates nothing.
>
> On the related question of whether terrorism--however defined or
> practiced--is prohibited or not by the canons and revelations of Islam,
> Christianity, and Judaism, I disagree with Abdul's take that the Holy books
> forbid terrorism or acts that can be construed as terrorism, especially if
> he means that these texts conclusively, unequivocally forbid them under any
> and all circumstances. There are clearly verses in the Quran, the Hadith,
> and the Sunnah that call for violence, even unprovoked, nihilist violence,
> against unbelievers. The relevant question is whether or how these verses
> are weighted against other verses in the same cannons that unequivocally
> condemn gratuitous violence against unbelievers (Christians and other
> non-Muslims) and even urge love toward the "people of the book." Another
> question is who constitutes an "unbeliever" and in what circumstance is such
> a designation warranted? There are many issues to consider:
>
> 1. Can the verses calling for violence and "terrorist" activities be
> realistically or even theologically detached in interpretive terms from the
> circumstances in which they were revealed? Some interpretations disregard
> the modern applicability of these violent verses or interpretively
> contextualize them as reflecting the state of the Muslim Ummah in 7th
> Century Arabia at a time when Islam was persecuted and was under threat from
> the traditional religious establishment, necessitating a flurry of
> revelations that explicitly call for violence against unbelievers because
> rapprochement seemed impossible and only aggression could have saved the
> young faith. Fast forward to the later revelations given when Islam was on
> secure ground, and was growing and expanding through imperial conquest and
> conversions. The verses and injunctions become decidedly more conciliatory
> and less violent, urging the accommodation of subordinated peoples and
> respect for the religions of subject peoples who would not convert. That
> tells me two things: that the context in which these verses were given
> should be factored into any comprehensive effort to interpret them for
> today's Muslims and that the Quran, like all other holy books, has to be
> read with a sense of history, circumstantial transitions, and in light of
> the prevailing order in a given epoch. To insist on interpreting verses
> across time and space and without a sense of revelatory transitions as the
> extremists do is to adopt a literalist approach to exegesis in order to
> justify a prepackaged agenda.
>
> 2. This all brings up the question of who exactly is an "unbeliever" as
> contained in the many verses in the Quran, Hadith, and Sunnah urging
> violence against "unbelievers."
>
> 3. Understandably, extremists are drawn toward an interpretations that
> understand the "unbelievers" in these verses to mean Christians and
> non-Muslims in all ages and everywhere while pragmatic Muslims insist on
> interpreting "unbelievers" in much narrower semiotic and contextual
> purviews.
>
> 4. Is one interpretation more valid than the other? Not necessarily.
> Interpretive conventions shift along with intellectual, economic, and
> political events and certain interpretations gain or lose currency depending
> on the state of mind or state of being of Islamic societies and depending on
> the age in which Muslims live.
>
> 5. There is always an ebb and flow to how moderate or extreme or intolerant
> interpretive conventions increase or decrease in appeal. In moments of
> insecurity and crisis, literalist interpretations and interpretations that
> discountenance temporal and spatial contextual mitigations tend to find more
> appeal, and vice versa.
>
> Bottom line: It's all in the interpretation, who is doing the
> interpretation, and why they prefer one interpretive convention to another.
> The Bible, especially the Old testament, contains verses that can be read
> and have been read as a manifesto for terrorism, racism, and slavery, and
> violent imperialism. Even the ascendancy of Christian Europe to power and
> stature after the Enlightenment did not stop the proliferation of extreme
> Biblical interpretations. It took the convergence of multiple modernist
> forces and influences and the revulsion of Christians themselves for extreme
> interpretations to be discarded for moderate ones that are compatible with
> the realities and pragmatics of the modern and postmodern world.
>
> It is therefore infinitely more productive to focus on why and how certain
> extremist interpretations persist and gain currency and become ideological
> manuals for terrorism than to engage in the escapist, defensive, and
> politically correct game of repeating the empty statement that the holy
> books forbid terrorism, which fails to explain why and how terrorism in the
> name of God has found appeal through many epochs in history.
>
> Obviously the ability of Christians to disregard or impose moderate
> interpretations on the letter of the Bible and the relative inability of
> Muslims to do so is inflected by other factors, as some religious scholars
> have posited:
>
> 1. Muslims believe that the Quran is a direct revelation from God while
> Christians believe that the Bible is the inspired World of God--or that God
> inspired men to write it. This has a huge implication for how the faithfuls
> of both religions approach their faiths and the injunctions in their
> respective holy books. In short, it means that, for Muslims, contextualizing
> and imposing culturally specific interpretive imperatives on violent verses
> to arrive at interpretations that mitigate or release faithfuls from their
> obligations is a lot harder.
>
> 2. In Christianity there is the added interpretive alibi/leeway of the
> Old/New testament divide. This allows Christians to separate injunctions
> given during the time of Law and those given during the time of Grace, the
> time of Grace (the new testament) being the overarching spiritual
> dispensation governing the life of Christians. This does not mean that
> violent verses in the old testament cannot and are not still being invoked
> to justify evil. It means that Christians who do not want to engage in
> violence or evil in the name of their religion have a very good excuse
> because they can legitimately claim that the Law (old testament) does not
> apply to them. There is, as far as I know, no equivalent of this spiritual
> disjuncture in Islam.
>
> For what it's worth, below is a relevant post I made in a discussion on
> extremism sparked by Farooq Kperogi's article in another forum. I was
> obviously responding both to the article and responses from ...
>
> read more »
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