The Council of State, a prestigious advisory body, has already warned that an outright ban, such as the one imposed Tuesday, would be vulnerable to a challenge on constitutional grounds. Similarly, legislators in the European Parliament have warned it could be stricken down in the European Court of Human Rights, an organ of the European Union.

Martha Nussbaum has an excellent, in-depth analysis of these sorts of laws, refuting on straightforward legal grounds the most common arguments in support of veil-bans.  She mainly points out that laws banning the veil don’t even pass the Lockean standard of religiously discriminatory laws (not to mention the erstwhile “accomdationist” standard used by the Supreme Court back before it became a tool of majoritarian will).  She says:

An example of a discriminatory law, said Locke, would be one making it illegal to speak Latin in a Church, but not restricting the use of Latin in schools.  Obviously, the point of such a law would be to persecute Roman Catholics.  But if a law is not persecutory in this way, it may stand, even though it may incidentally impose burdens on some religious activities more than on others.

Banning the veil is clearly directed at a particular community whose praxis is taken to be a threat that is described in the aforementioned WashPo article as “steeped in traditions of secularism and Christianity.”  There are some who would claim that Christianity is a religion that set the stage for secularism (and these are usually the same historical determinists who say that the problem with Islam is the lack of a Reformation event in its past… which is just wacky).  But the fact is that Europe is steeped in Christian secularism where Christianity is the norm and the s0-called secular environment relies on that norm to function.

The criticism that Prothero levels at the “Many Paths to One Truth” folks is that they remake other religions in their own image (this being labeled a colonial project by Prothero).  In my view, Prothero’s  “God is Not One” claim makes similarly arrogant claims about other people’s religious convictions because it maps out stable borders between “legitimate” religions (like the various flavors of Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam) while delegitimizing other types of religious convictions (like the belief that all religious paths are oriented toward one supreme maker).

But perhaps we’re thinking too much in the abstract.  Let’s take a few examples of what I take to be the implications of Prothero’s approach.

Example 1:

The former Episcopalian Bishop of Newark John Spong has a short post in which he humbly suggests that he is on one of many paths to the same place.  These would have to be precisely what Prothero criticizes.  But it seems to me that the Bishop is not saying that other paths are like his. Nor is he one of those who says “well, really all (true/good) religions are essentially about love/compassion” or “wisdom” or “faith in something.”  Quite certainly not – he seems to be saying that his way of dealing with the God challenge is through the church, while others may deal with this challenge differently, with different rituals and different beliefs.  This seems okay with him and he does not feel comfortable with denying their truth claims, nor does he go so far as Prothero does by describing and categorizing the beliefs of others – an avoidance not based on political correctness, I think, but more likely because Truth for Spong is non-discursive.

I know that it leads me beyond all human limits, even the limits of Christianity, into the experience of the divine.

In some Arabic Ṣūfī texts, this experience of the divine is called dhawq – something like “taste” or “sensory experience.”  For Shelby Spong and for the Ṣūfī writer, truth is something experienced rather than explained.    That is, The Truth is an inner truth for which religious expression of many sorts is the discursive result.  It’s not so much that religions aren’t true or good or real… it’s that they are not The Truth.  That is something that can only be achieved interiorly.

Now, Prothero would say, despite your respect for the other paths, you have boiled down The Truth to something that re-orients all these other paths to your interior truth… Spong assumes that other religions lead toward a non-discursive truth and remakes other religions in his image.  For instance, some might hold interior truth to mean relatively little, preferring to valorize the outward practice of religion, which is, in this particular view, what really matters to God anyhow.

Example 2:

In my last post, I briefly mentioned supersessionary logic.  It seems like I should dwell on it a bit more.  The concept is found most prominently in Christianity in Islam.  Judaism, according to most traditional Christian readings after the formative period, is a sort of obsolete predecessor to Christianity.  Christianity fulfilled the prophecies of Judaism, meaning that Christianity and the church now takes up the space that Judaism once did… hence the old anti-Semitic diatribe of Jews as inherently “stubborn” in their refusal to accept the message of Christianity.  It’s like the people who can’t believe that there are still holdouts using VCRs when the DVD is now available, except with the whole of salvation at stake.

Somewhat similarly, Islamic readings of Christianity traditionally hold that Christians and Jews both received messages from God that were in complete agreement with the Qur’ān.  In the hands of mischievous Christians and Jews, however, the texts were twisted to serve the worldly ends of the arrogant, tampering Christians and Jews (modern Biblical criticism has been deputized as a part of this argument).  According to this view, the Qurʾān alone is untainted by tampering and thus stands as the sole unadulterated source for God’s speech.

*            *            *

As we can see, religions are not discrete, easily separated entities.  Christianity as a phenomenon is an integral part of Islam’s worldview, as is Judaism to Christianity’s.  This is not the case only for Abrahamic religions – recall the comments made by Brit Hume of Fox “News”:

He is said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. My message to Tiger would, ‘Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.

Buddhism’s (or really any other religion’s) failure to offer forgiveness and redemption in the way that only Christ can is part of Hume’s Christian outlook.

The only difference between these kinds of “arrogance” and that of Karen Armstrong and the Dalai Lama is that Armstrong and the Dalai Lama have affirming views of other religious claims.  That is, if we accept that Muslims and Christians with the views cited above can hold these views of religious others, then why not the people whose religious convictions lead them to picture the other in a way that is no more or less accurate than the traditional Muslim or Christian view (how could one have a complete picture of a whole religion’s total ideology?), but that affirms their wisdom and righteousness.

Nonetheless, according to Prothero as I understand him so far, exclusive religious claims are acceptable and even encouraged – they are the reality that we must deal with.  However, it is unacceptable to hold neo-syncretic interpretive claims that identify commonality and, like Armstrong in her interview with WashPo, take that commonality as a religious conviction.

Narrating the story yourself gives you a chance to tell it like you want it.

Stephen Prothero’s recent post in the “On Faith” section of the The Washington Post accuses of condescension the  people who see all religions as different paths to a single truth — apparently those like Karen Armstrong and the Dalai Lama.  However, Prothero’s rather straight-forward claim that “religions are different” ends up assuming a few things:

1)    He assumes that religions make similar enough claims or claims about near enough the same thing that we can contrast them as religions.  This means that religions are similar… comparable… so to speak.  Right?

2)    He also assumes that as a religion professor, he is able to take an interpretive stance that allows him to analyze these differences between religions in some manner that avoids the condescension/colonialism critique that he levels against his comparativist colleagues.

Prothero mentions that those who believe that all religions lead to the same truth actually end up describing that singular truth differently.  When comparativists do this, they remake other people’s “truth” in their own image.  Hence the colonialism/condescension.

However, I think we may safely assume that the role of the religion professor pointing out differences between religions is precisely projecting onto others his idiosyncratic perception of other people’s truths and the differences between them.  No matter what “differences” Prothero comes up with (in this case, the trinity and the hajj), he is simply making the comparativist claim in reverse.  Beyond all that, we could safely assume that a Christian would understand his differences with Islam in a way that is significantly different from the way a Muslim understands his differences with Christianity.

Particularly for the Abrahamic religions and their various supersessionary logics, religions use other religious traditions to support their own claims such that other religions (their errors, stubbornness, what-have-you) become part of the colonializing religion’s terrain and self-image.  This seems not only to happen at the moments of a tradition’s inception but continuously, in iterations.

Much could be said about comparison and the problems of comparative practices in religious studies, but the assertion that “religions are different” falls prey to the selfsame critiques.

In the meantime, I highly recommend Wendy Doniger’s book that carries the most awesomest title one could imagine:  The Implied Spider.  She has some very interesting things to say about the problems of failing to differentiate (racism, for instance, that a certain color of people all hold the same traits) and for differentiating to the extreme (wherein the other becomes entirely exoticized and such that one cannot identify with them at all).

I’m just saying… it doesn’t get any better than this.

I guess I’m a little weirded out by the marriage-focused lyrics and costumes for a bunch of her songs.  Like, how many times can TS end up in a white wedding-ish dress by the end of the video?  And what’s with “I talked to your dad, go pick out a white dress”? I talked to your dad??!  To be fair, my friend thinks that “Love Story” is secretly a gay anthem.  But that’s a whole different story.

And one more thing about the “You Belong With Me” video… the cheer captain is the evil girl who’s messing up the chances of the nerdy (yet secretly beautiful! just take off the glasses!) girl… but the perfect guy is still the QB of the football team.  First Friday Night Lights with the artistic, sensitive Matt Saracen and now this?  I’m just saying… caricaturing the cheer captain while idealizing the QB strikes me as… odd.  Come to think of it, Leila Garrity isn’t portrayed with much sympathy either in FNL.

Okay, but seriously, this song is awesome.

The regime wants to be a nuclear power but could well be happy with a peaceful civilian program (which could make the challenge it poses more complex). What’s the evidence? Well, over the last five years, senior Iranian officials at every level have repeatedly asserted that they do not intend to build nuclear weapons. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has quoted the regime’s founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who asserted that such weapons were “un-Islamic.” The country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa in 2004 describing the use of nuclear weapons as immoral. In a subsequent sermon, he declared that “developing, producing or stockpiling nuclear weapons is forbidden under Islam.” Last year Khamenei reiterated all these points after meeting with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. Now, of course, they could all be lying. But it seems odd for a regime that derives its legitimacy from its fidelity to Islam to declare constantly that these weapons are un-Islamic if it intends to develop them. It would be far shrewder to stop reminding people of Khomeini’s statements and stop issuing new fatwas against nukes.

Key points: 1) Khomeini and Khamenei both issued fatwas against the production and use of nuclear weapons.  2) all signals from the bureaucracy point to a desire for a civilian program.  3) they could all be lying.  It’s this last point, number three, that I’d like to think about.  If you listen to the Very Loud Voices in the US, you’d assume that Iran is hell bent on getting a nuclear weapon, which is exactly the opposite of what everyone is saying in Iran.  

This kind of thing is pretty similar to the stuff over at Arabic Media Shack, where the blogger Rob is frequently found extolling the virtues of open-source intelligence (that is, the kind of intelligence that you gain from reading newspapers, talking to people on the record whom you aren’t paying as informants, reading public statements).

Recently, the US media has been filled with analysis of the Taliban’s strategy and intentions, much of it focusing on the Taliban’s apparent interest in taking over Pakistan and its nukes.  What’s striking (at least to me) is how much of this English-language punditry is based on the theories of strategy and security that dominate US academia but not, however, the actual words of the Taliban.  Listen to this interview and notice how the things the Taliban spokesman emphasizes and considers important differ dramatically from what the US punditry claims the Taliban thinks and considers important.  Notice, for example, how taking over Pakistan or its nukes is never mentioned. 

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again:  the Taliban are a bunch of rural hicks (the spokesman doesn’t even  speak Arabic) who primarily care about ruling Afghanistan.  Why are they hostile to the US?  Because from 1996 until 2001 the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, then the US tried to drive them out and replace them with a pro-US puppet.   It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out why they would want to keep fighting the US in Afghanistan. 

I’m not really suggesting that Ahmadinejad and the Taliban are, like, warm and fuzzy or anything.  But if you listen to the Loud Voices in the States, you’d think that there’s an evil conspiracy out there that’s made up of pretty much every Islam-oriented political group.  But it’s not just a conspiracy, it’s the conspiracy of all conspiracies, and it’s aimed (eventually) at World Domination (cue evil laughter).  The Taliban, according to this thinking, is definitely after the nukes in Pakistan because, well, they’re crazed psychopaths who hate our freedoms and want to blow us up who nonetheless have the organizational skills to organize a vast conspiracy about their tactical and strategic goals.  

Similarly, even though Iran says over and over again that nukes are un-Islamic and that they want energy independence through nuclear energy, we’re still pretty sure that they’re crazed psychopaths who want to bomb the kablooie out of Israel and, once they get around to it, the US.

Leo Strauss d. 1973

It’s a commonplace to say that politicians lie, but the suspicions of Taliban and Iranian intentions seem more insidious than that.  This sort of analysis (step one, assume their sinister intentions; step two, use all denials of these intentions as further evidence of their sinister intentions) is exactly the kind of thinking that got us into Iraq.  It’s actually a tactic of interpretation that at least goes back to the emergence of the Neoconservative movement in Washington in the 1970s and Team B, led by Richard Pipes and Paul Wolfowitz, who argued that no matter what the Soviet Union said publicly, they were continuing the build up their capabilities in violation of the treaty they signed with Nixon.  When CIA analysts found no weapons buildups and no advanced capabilities, contrary to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s public proclamations, Team B took this to mean that the Soviet capabilities were so advanced that they could avoid detection.(1)

The Neoconservative movement, which produced these kinds of brilliant interpretive techniques, has its intellectual foundations in the teachings and writings of Leo Strauss.  Strauss was a political philosopher whose work influenced the study of Islamic philosophy in the Western academy and, at the other end of things, the Neoconservative movement.  I’m no Strauss-specialist, but I’ll give this a go.  

His method of reading, as received by his students in both Islamic philosophy and in politics, is based on certain assumptions about what a text is about.  To take the example of Islamic philosophy, since I know more about it, Straussian readers would postulate that Islamic philosophy is essentially political philosophy and further that “Islamic society” (in all times and places, it would seem) is hostile to philosophy.  Therefore, the real message of the philosopher must be hidden somehow.  Sometimes the very absence of something that ought to be in the text can signify its importance (much like, perhaps, the absence of a door in a house might occasion pause… it’s something so necessary that its absence is a statement).  

It’s a code, in other words, that is decoded by the elect (that is, the Straussian readers).  Straussian political philosophy (different from but related to the Straussian method of reading) requires that one accept that philosophers are persecuted.  Thus, philosophers must create myths that hold the moral fabric of society together, telling people what they want to hear while maintaining their own elite knowledge that these are necessary fictions.  For Strauss, religion is the opium of the masses, but this is a good thing!  Because without that opium, the social structure that allows the philosophers to exist would collapse.  

(I’m not really sure if Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and the gang are really “philosophers” in this scenario… that is, I’m not sure if they believe what they’re saying about the threats that face the US or if it is/was geared entirely toward a domestic audience.  What I’ve read about it suggests that there may have been a bit of both, depending on the situation.)

Going back to Yglesias’s citation of Zakaria and the situation with Iran, Matt says the following:

Of course it would be silly to be naive and just base our policy on the assumption that the Iranians are telling the truth about all this. But by the same token, we should recognize that they might be telling the truth. Or, perhaps most realistically of all, that “they” may disagree about this.

As with the study of literature or philosophy, it’s a little naive to assume that the text means exactly what it says, but when it comes to literature or philosophy, the intentionality of the author wouldn’t really have very much bearing on the meaning of the text.  To take an extreme example, if I wrote yesterday’s shopping list in iambic pentameter and it was somehow published and thereafter taken to be a poetic celebration of consumerism (or a parody of overcelebrated consumerism), then the fact that I just wanted to get something to eat from the market wouldn’t matter much to what this text meant.  

On the other hand, the intentions of the state of Iran matter very much, though it would be equally naive to assume, as Yglesias points out, that “they” never disagree… that is, unlike the vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 1 episodes 1-2, the leadership of Iran do not share a common soul and a common mind.

It’s entirely possible, even likely, that a lot of people in the State Department know all of this and are well aware of the probability that Iran doesn’t really want a nuclear weapon and has never expressed interest in one.  But the broader public perception (and worse, the use of those perceptions by American politicians) of the intentions of the Taliban and the Iranian government are the insidious side of the code-obsession that I blogged about earlier.  

Movies and TV shows constantly present us with vast terrorist conspiracies, maniacally driven toward destruction and lacking the rational capabilities to understand realpolitik and thus properly assess their own self-interests.  Given our own recent history with foreign policy blunders, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that a country could mis-identify its own interests, but our current tendency as a public to assume conspiracy can be an obstacle to security.

(1) This paragraph is largely based on the excellent BBC documentary, The Power of Nightmares, part I of which can be watched here.  See particularly the segment from about minute 22.

A large part of the design’s success stems from the altered relationship between the pedestrian and the structures that frame the square. Walking down the cramped, narrow sidewalks, a visitor could never get a feel for the vastness of the place. Now, standing in the middle of Broadway, you have the sense of being in a big public room, the towering billboards and digital screens pressing in on all sides.

I think that, ideally, you’d want to do more, either by connecting the pedestrian segments somehow or by doing this to whole blocks.  Apparently there are critics of this plan?  Is there anyone (besides delivery people) who actually think they were going to get anywhere in Times Sq by driving before it was turned over to the pedestrians?  And do you really need cars for grit?  Much of downtown Barcelona is pedestrian-only, and I can promise you that it is gritty, in spite of its medieval trappings.  Though I’m not sure there was any true grit left in an area that has ESPN Zone and a Toys ‘R’ Us.

Slightly different from, though interesting to compare it to the project being undertaken in Cambridge by Abd al-Hakim Murad (aka. Tim Winter).  Who does some of the best lectures on Islamic studies I’ve ever sat in on.

But really, the vastest of all the fascinating movie trends is the CODES!  I’m speaking here, of course, about movies like National Treasure, National Treasure 2, Da Vinci Code, and the new (haven’t seen it yet!) Angels & Demons.  But also TV shows like NUMB3RS (since beginning to write this post, I’ve watched a view episodes), where the mathematician-brother of the FBI agent cracks cases using math(s)… the opening credits are played while an echoing, nerdy voice recites this gem:

We all use math every day; to predict weather, to tell time, to handle money. Math is more than formulas or equations; it’s logic, it’s rationality, it’s using your mind to solve the biggest mysteries we know.

I first got obsessed with recent code-movies when my brother convinced me to watch National Treasure, citing what has to be one of the best blog posts of all time, which lists a few reasons why National Treasure is the best movie of all time.  The kicker is number 6:  ”The movie re-contextualizes every important event in American history [I would add world history] as an attempt to either conceal or find treasure.”  Also remember, treasure must be said “tray-zure.”

So with this advice, this blog post, and a certain bottle of savvy, I sat down to watch it.  And it’s so awesome!  Since then, I watched Da Vinci Code, and National Treasure is by far the better movie.  But they have a fundamental aspect in common:  the things  you look at every day and think of them “I know the signification of this” are actually part of a Great Cosmic Riddle and/or Great Cosmic Conspiracy.  Not only that, but the answer to the cosmic riddle is dangerous, and if it falls into the wrong hands, there will be disaster. (Hence the action movie.)

We don’t just like this, we love this (almost as much as I love using italics in this post).  We love to think that there’s a fabric of meaning in the paintings, documents, and buildings that eyes and feet have tread over and over without ever noticing.  And, unlike the confusion of multiple interpretive voices, a code is so much more satisfying because there’s a single meaning that is right, and it can only be uncovered by the correct reader.  Maybe we just like getting let in on the conspiracy (along with the millions of other people who watch the National Treasure/Dan Brown movies).

But I think it goes deeper than that.  We want there to be secret meanings, which are all connected and make sense (thus leading us to tray-zure).  Maybe we’ve lost faith in grand theories and universal narratives, and we want to be assured that somewhere behind it all there’s a man behind the curtain.  Now I know Dan Brown has been criticized for taking shots at faith and whatnot, but this “symbology” (to use Langdon’s title) is religious in some sense.

Religious people and people who claim not to be often claim that “things will all work out in the end” or that “everything happens for a reason.”  (V in V for Vendetta assures us that there is no such thing as coincidences.)  This is a sort of faith in a hidden code to the universe, and a will that guides it.  Whether it’s math or science or history or Progress or the machinations of one’s own love life, people seem quite attached to the idea that the universe and the things that happen are part of a grander plan… the fact that they themselves can’t decode it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.

Leopold von Ranke

Numerous famous historians have claimed that they do, in fact, have access to the secret code.  I’m thinking specifically here of Ranke (d. 1886) and Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), though feel free to add others in the comments section.  Ranke, who is remembered as being only interested in wie es eigentlich gewesen,  believed that History properly moved from the meditation on particulars to the realization of the universals:

…history recognizes something infinite in every existence: in every condition, in every being, something eternal, coming from God; and this is its vital principle (The Theory and Practice of History, 38). 

And here’s Ibn Khaldun, from the Foreword to his Muqaddimah, on the inner meaning of history:

HISTORY is a discipline widely cultivated among nations and races. It is eagerly sought after. The men in the street, the ordinary people, aspire to know it. Kings and leaders vie for it.

Both the learned and the ignorant are able to understand it. For on the surface history is no more than information about political events, dynasties, and occurrences of the remote past, elegantly presented and spiced with proverbs. It serves to entertain large, crowded gatherings and brings to us an understanding of human affairs. (It shows) how changing conditions affected (human affairs), how certain dynasties came to occupy an ever wider space in the world, and how they settled the earth until they heard the call and their time was up.

The inner meaning of history, on the other hand, involves speculation and an attempt to get at the truth, subtle explanation of the causes and origins of existing things, and deep knowledge of the how and why of events. (History,) therefore, is firmly rooted in philosophy. It deserves to be accounted a branch of (philosophy).

I haven’t been able to look into this very deeply, but my feeling is that History for Ibn Khaldun, acting as a branch of philosophy, tells us very much about the nature of God because if we learn not just what happened but the patterns, the reasons for the rise and fall of civilizations, we can glimpse the hand of God.

On the other hand, citing Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, we could just go for the certainty gained from time travel:

BERNARD: I’ll tell you your problem.  No guts.

HANNAH: Really?

BERNARD: By which I mean a visceral belief in yourself.  Gut instinct.  The part of you which doesn’t reason.  The certainty for which there is no back-reference.  Because time is reversed.  Tock, tick goes the universe and then recovers itself, but it was enough, you were in there and you bloody know.