Elizabeth Moon upset a lot of people over the week and a half by posting about citizenship, the 9/11 attacks, and the proposed Cordoba cultural center a few blocks from Ground Zero. As she said about building the cultural center, she “should have been able to predict that this would upset a lot of people.” There were many folks condemning the perceived nativism and bigotry of her comments, and calls to boot her off her GoH spot at Wiscon. (Wiscon’s statement about it here.)
Reading Moon’s post, and some of the other responses on the internet, and even more widely about the controversy about the Cordoba Initiative’s community center in Manhattan in general, I am struck at a rather unfortunate blurring between Islam in general, and politicized extremist Islam. We have, at the moment, Islam the religion as a whole, and within it a movement of wackos who probably have their closest Christian analogs being the Christian Identity movement. The main difference is that the Christian Identity wackos have never gained enough political power to gain control of a whole country and start hanging gay people. The Islamic wackos have. And all sides of the debate seem to contribute to this unhealthy identification of extremists with the whole in a sick sort of codependent symbiosis where Muslim voices who critique politicized extremist Islam are marginalized by the left in the name of tolerance and the right subsequently decries the lack of “moderate” Muslim voices condemning the acts of the extremists, and where a sick pastor on the right can threaten to burn a Koran to protest the violence of Islam and the administration on the left can successfully shut him down primarily by pleading fears of the violence this would provoke in the Islamic world.
So, while it’s fine using this as a teachable moment, I wonder if all the calls for tolerance whenever 9/11 comes up is not, in fact, helping to blur the line. It is sort of like responding to an anti-Christan rant about Fred Phelps by calling for more understanding and tolerance of Christians in general. You may have a good point, but by ignoring the fact the original person was reacting to a subset of crazy people and identifying them with the whole, you end up tacitly going along with identifying the crazy people with the whole.
3 Comments
A.R.Yngve · September 23, 2010 at 3:00 pm
I can’t help but wonder if everything that’s been going down for the past 10 years has been a theater of battling straw men, while the actual underlying causes have been ignored…
By now I’m fairly convinced that if oil prospectors had never found rich petroleum deposits in the Middle East in the early 1900s, the whole of the region would have been much better off long-term. No Saudi kings, no Wahabism, no Al-Qaeda, no Saddam Hussein… and certainly no Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.
Oil income — billions and billions of dollars flowing from the rest of the world into the coffers of dictatorships and tribal kingdoms — has allowed autocrats to stay in power, extremist movements to gain funding and the whole region to stagnate economically, politically and culturally.
Oil, not religion, is the sickness of the Middle East — and terrorism is the symptom. Technology drives progress, and in this case we specifically need new technology to drive out the old (i.e. the internal combustion engine).
In short: Religion is a straw man. If people want to stop Al-Qaeda, they should stop driving gasoline-powered cars. Which is of course not going to happen until the oil runs out — which is bound to happen anyway.
The history books 200 years from now will not call this era “The Era of Religious Extremism” but rather something like “The End of the Petroleum Era”, with Osama bin Laden reduced to a footnote.
S Andrew Swann · September 23, 2010 at 5:14 pm
IMO, placing oil as the root cause is as much an oversimplification as blaming Islam, or blaming the existence of Israel. There are natural resource issues, geopolitical issues, and (just as important) demographic issues at play here. What we have here is a large group of people in the Muslim countries around the Gulf who are subject to brutally repressive regimes, which has an extremely large population of disenfranchised jobless youth. That young angry population is extremely susceptible to any wacko with an agenda and enough religious training to make their arguments sound theologically plausible. The regimes in the Gulf region tolerate these wacky imams for the same reason European nobility supported the Crusades– it gets all the potentially dangerous hotheads focusing their violent tendencies away from their immediate surroundings all under the auspices of divine will.
Wing Manion · October 24, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Pathetic, simply pathetic.
Stick a fork in the Sci-Fi community, it’s dead, Jim!
There is no more science fiction, and soon there will be no more fiction at all, just printed, and tweeted, reams of political rectitude, that offends no one—except, designated scapegoats, such as white males, Christians and the all-purpose wicked businessman; no more thought, no more honestly stated opinions—“Oooooh, should he/she be allowed to say that? Won’t that make people uncomfortable? OOooh, that’s racist!”
Harlon Ellison, Ray Bradbury and Heinlein, among countless other Sci-Fi writers, have all written stuff far more controversial, not to mention abrasive stuff, than Moon has in this post. If her intelligent, rational essay can create such a furor in the Sci-fi community—then there ain’t no real Sci-Fi community anymore! Let’s all just join hands and belt out “Kumbaya!”
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