Letter 106 to Friends and Familiares: thoughts on the Charle Hebdo murders

The recent article in the New Yorker about the murders of admittedly distasteful journalists in Paris (http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/blame-for-charlie-hebdo-murders) brings up so much so quickly. To me the defining statement of that short-but-sweat article is, "Islam today includes a substantial minority of believers who countenance, if they don’t actually carry out, a degree of violence in the application of their convictions that is currently unique."  I disagree with the size of this malevolent minority.

My sense is that it is smaller; it does not take many people to wreak havoc and intimidate fellow congregants. The key word is "currently". It is difficult for Westerners to understand the lethal power of religious wars since we are three or four centuries beyond them; indeed, the two great splits in Xianity are five hundred and a thousand years in our past. There are three inflammatory divisions here, two within Islam:

1. At its start, Islam was a reaction to "corrupted Judaism", much as the Calvinist reformation was to corrupted Catholicism.
2. Within Islam has been the schism between the Sunnis and Shi´ites (vaguely analogous to intra-Xian arguments over graven images and trans-substantiation).
3. There has been a pervasive fear since the 1970s that there would someday be a clash, not so much of civilizations, but between poorer regions and wealthier ones (the North-South conflict).

There are two other concerns I have, one specifically with the Holy Qu’ran (a beautiful and majestic work) and the other with the history of Islam as a bedrock of social values.  It is likely that the Holy Qu’ran has no more violence in it than the Tanakh (the Old Testament). The subtle distinction that concerns me is the temporal difference between the two. The violence recounted in the Old Testament was a distant and redacted historical narrative of events occurring centuries before.

As such, descriptions of the violently triumphant arrival and mastery of the Promised Land by the tribes of Jacob were not intended as current “how-to” instructions on getting even while getting mad. We all know of the radical Israeli Jews, often living in settlements, who condone violence against Palestineans for just these historically attenuated reasons. They hold little currency with their fellow faithful; as a small minority of a tiny religious population, they are too few to be taken seriously.

Muhamad, on the other hand, was conveying God’s wishes to a beleaguered group of devout followers who found themselves in danger of being wiped out. Thus, the Prophet advocated resorting to violence in the present to survive. This defensive doctrine evolved into a justification for imposing the religion upon others when his new tribe was on a roll. With that text forever being in the present (not pluperfect) tense, a potentially tragic resonance remains available to violent personalities looking for an excuse.

Second, as corrupt as the Churches of Constantinople and Rome might have become, they represented a core belief around which believers and dissenters oriented themselves and centered their societies, values and debates. When the Mongols smashed Baghdad into a million pieces in the mid-thirteenth century, Islam’s core was ripped out, leaving far-flung communities of the gutted caliphate to mutate into culturally conditioned, at-times virulent, off-shoots.

So, at least in my fettered (¿fetid?) mind, none of these strands in isolation can explain the current wave of the murderous ideology described in the New Yorker. The great majority -- and I mean on the magnitude of 98% -- of the Muslims brush aside these ideas and live for a better life for their children, their kin and their countries. For example, the doctrine of jihad, for these warm-hearted people, is not a call to conquer others but to subdue their self-will. Perhaps I am reading my values into the equation here, but these people are as friendly and peaceable as anybody else I know.

Yet, we live in a post-nihilistic global culture that segments people through the social media and inter-net; the world remains awash with guns. These themes -- and others -- are conflating into a wave of violence as unfamiliar to us as it is uncivilized to almost everybody else. Remember, if 98% of 1.2 billion people live peaceably while the remainder insist on violence, the world has twenty-four million people who embody a credo of homicidal hatred looking for a reason. This sad phenomenon is hardly phenomenal as another article on the murders argues persuasively (http://tabletmag.com/scroll/188143/je-suis-charlie).