Whatever your opinion of our current president may be, you have to give him this – the man is no slacker. He has been a very busy guy from day one, and he is not afraid to make big decisions and grand gestures. Whether he’s getting the country out of a ditch or driving it off a cliff is a matter of opinion of course, but no one can deny that he’s got his foot down hard on the accelerator.
This week the president was overseas, sharing his charisma and can-do spirit with various foreign audiences and heads of state. One of the main items on his agenda seems to have been to start repairing our battered image in the eyes of the international community. He had this to say in a speech before an adoring crowd in Turkey:
“"Let me say this as clearly as I can. The United States is not and will never be at war with Islam. In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical ... in rolling back the violent ideologies that people of all faiths reject."
His words are stirring and packed with an emotional punch, as we’ve come to expect from him. But, as we’ve also come to expect, some of the ideas expressed in those words don’t seem to have much connection with logic or reality.
To be sure, it is true that we are not nor could we ever feasibly be “at war” with Islam or any other religion. Islam is a large, diverse belief system practiced in many different parts of the world and in many different forms. We could not conceivably go to war against such a thing even if we wanted to.
So I have no argument with the first part of the quote cited above. But that last part about us having a “partnership with the Muslim world” and “rolling back the violent ideologies that people of all faiths reject” suffers from a bad case of what-is-he-talking-about.
If we have secured some sort of partnership with the entire Muslim world, that news somehow escaped my notice. The “Muslim world” is as diverse and hard to pin down a concept as the religion of Islam, and I can’t begin to imagine how we could secure a partnership with such a thing.
And it is beyond ludicrous to suggest that “people of all faiths” reject “violent ideologies.” The men who flew those planes into the World Trade Center were people of faith, as were those who planned and finance their operation and those who cheered the success of their mission after the fact.
What the president was describing was the world as he would like it to be, a world where the great majority of people of all faiths shared the same ideas about peace, community, and freedom. It’s a shame that we have to live in this world and not the one that exists in his speech, but such is life.
In fact there are tenets of Islam that are practiced by a significant portion of its adherents that conflict directly with some of our core beliefs, such as freedom of worship and expression. You can quickly earn a death sentence even in some of the more moderate Islamic countries if you say something considered to be disrespectful to their Prophet or dare to convert to a different religion.
Some of these countries are our allies of course, because in a complex and imperfect world we have mutual interests with them that outweigh our disagreements, for the time being at least. But make no mistake, here in the real world there are differences in our belief systems that run deep and are dearly held on both sides. Barring a sudden shift in the value system of one side or the other, any partnership we have with the “Muslim world” figures to remain a tenuous one at best.
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