Time Immortal

Erf writes in, in response to this article:

I think the people who point out that honour killing comes from pre-Islam cultures are trying to keep this from tainting all Muslims everywhere. Moreover, they’re saying that it’s not Islam that causes this — we shouldn’t be blaming the religion for this insanity. I think there’s something to that, trying to separate correllation from causation.

That said, the people involved in these honour killings are from more than just Pakistan — there was the Egyption immigrant family you mentioned a while ago, for example. So it’s broad. Maybe some sort of insane pseudo-fundamentalist sub-religion who never grew out of “the old ways”? (The distinction between “Muslim” and “Fundamentalist Muslim” is a very important one, and shouldn’t be dropped; otherwise we encourage people to lump us in with the people trying to take science out of schools.)

On one hand, I agree.. I think there is a legitimate reason to point out that honour killings are a cultural practice which emerged prior to the promulgation of the Islamic faith, and which are practiced in other regions of the world besides those in which Islam is the majority demographic. Likewise, I agree — at least in principle — that where the association between honour killing and Islam exists (which is a very broad range of areas, unfortunately), one can generally look at the particular strain of Islam (because Islam, like Christianity, has many divisions within it) in that region and perceive that it is of a more radicalized bent.

But regarding the first point, I think of something I wrote a short while back: “In Christian tradition, the early church didn’t necessarily celebrate religious holidays in the way they are traditionally celebrated now. Christmas trees and Easter eggs are two easy examples of things that began outside of Christian tradition which were absorbed into, and in essence ’sanctified’ by, historical Christianity, and are now recognizable as symbolistic components of the Christian observance of these religious holidays. Within…Catholicism, vast amounts of philosophy were absorbed directly out of Greek tradition, and as a result the Church was able to formally articulate one of its most important teachings: transubstantiation and the Real Presence of Christ in the celebration of the Eucharist.

Religions are not static entities (or, at least, shouldn’t be), but are instead dynamic things which adopt and (hopefully!) sanctify certain practices from the cultures from which they emerge (or into which they extend). This has certainly been the case with Christianity. Should it come as any surprise that Islam — if not entirely, then at least certain local variants of it — has potentially done the same?” As unfortunate as it is to say, I think it is reasonably safe to assume that these more “radicalized” strains of Islam have, in fact, absorbed honour killing into their core theology, and promote the practice on that basis.

More interestingly, though, is the analogy to the fundamentalist Christians. While there is something of a parallel that can be drawn, it should be noted that mainstream Christians are, typically, very willing to speak out against the more ridiculous things that fundies do. What is more, mainstream Christians often do speak out in exactly that way. The “science in the classroom” issue is a good example of this, actually, and for every Christian who argues in print that evolution is the devil’s tool, there are other Christians who will step in — often with some serious academic firepower at their disposal — to call B.S.

(Of course, it serves to note that whereas fundamentalist Christians typically just make Christians look ignorant and anti-science, fundamentalist Muslims often have slightly more…ah…murderous aspirations — in this regard, the parallelism in the comparison mostly fails.)

The same is true, to a degree, on the Islamic side, but with a difference. Whereas in Christianity, the fundies are a (vocal) minority, in Islam it is beginning to look like the fundamentalist strains are becoming the mainstream strains, while more moderate theological schools are being pushed to the side.

Islam is divided into Shia and Sunni variants, each of which has a powerful, oil-rich nation that serves as a kind of driving force for the promulgation and expansion of radicalized strains of each. Sunni Islam is the religion of Saudi Arabia, and that nation’s oil money gets used to finance mosques and schools around the world…mosques and schools in which the Saudi interpretation of the Islamic faith (a very ‘fundamentalist’ interpretation, to be sure) is what is taught. Shia gets its drive and financing from Iran, but the net outcomes are the same. In either case, the strains of Islam that are becoming more and more common in the world, driven as they are by the absurd revenues that Iran and Saudi Arabia are making off of the sale of oil, are the fundamentalist ones.

And increasingly, we are seeing that more moderate voices are being either marginalized or, in a lot of cases, actively hounded out of their faith communities. That’s certainly the fate that befell Canada’s own Tarek Fatah, and his story is hardly an uncommon one.

It would be easy to suggest that this is just some insane little cultish interpretation of the religion that does not speak for the whole. But, as was noted, a lot of the problems that this fundamentalist Islam causes are found in many different places throughout the world. That suggests that the radicalism itself is as broad in scope as the range of places in which things like Islam-linked honour killings occur. Which makes sense — that , in Islam, is the school of thought behind which the big money can be found. It has drive, and it has ambition, and it is becoming (I think) the norm, rather than the bizarre little exception to the rule (unlike in Christianity).