[Mb-civic] William Dowell on George Bush's Wahabbis

[Michael Butler]

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Tomgram: William Dowell on George Bush's Wahabbis

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2244

Whether the Ten Commandments, graven in stone, sit on a lawn by a government
building or in a courthouse, isn't for me exactly a life-and-death issue --
and I think I'm not alone on this, which is why the Ten Commandments cases
at the Supreme Court right now are so dangerous. The Bush administration and
its various fundamentalist allies (religious and political) have proven
especially skilled at finding wedge issues that, because they only seem to
go so far, successfully challenge and blur previous distinctions, thereby
opening yet more possibilities. The Supreme Court's decision in these
particular cases holds great promise for further blurring the lines that
once separated church and state in our country.

We're in a period, of course, when lines of every sort, involving civil
rights, privacy, foreign and domestic spying, presidential power,
Congressional rules, the checks-and-balances that once were such a proud
part of our political system, and so many other matters are blurring
radically. We also have a President who is in the process of casting off the
constraints of any presidency, while placing religion with powerful emphasis
at the very center of Washington's new political culture. He is now adored,
if not essentially worshipped, by his followers as he travels the country
dropping in at carefully vetted "town meetings"; and the adoration is often
not just of him as a political leader but as a religious one, as a
manifestation of God's design for us. It's in this context that the modest
Ten Commandments cases are being heard; in the context, that is, of the
destruction of what's left of an authentic American republican (rather than
Republican) culture.

Below, William Dowell, a former Time magazine Middle Eastern correspondent
and, at present, editor of the Global Beat ("resources for the global
journalist"), a weekly on-line review of international security affairs
published by New York University's Center for War, Peace, and the News
Media, widens the religious lens to include the Middle East and so suggests
another context in which the Ten Commandments cases might be considered. (A
shorter version of this piece will appear Tuesday, March 8 on the op-ed page
of the Los Angeles Times.) Tom

    American Wahabbis and the Ten Commandments
    By William Thatcher Dowell

    For anyone who actually reads the Bible, there is a certain irony in the
current debate over installing the Ten Commandments in public buildings. As
everyone knows, the second commandment in the King James edition of the
Bible states quite clearly: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,
or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth
below, or that is in the water under the earth." It is doubtful that the
prohibition on "graven images" was really concerned with images like the
engraving of George Washington on the dollar bill. Rather it cautions
against endowing a physical object, be it a "golden calf" or a two-ton slab
of granite, with spiritual power.

    In short, it is the spirit of the commandments, not their physical
representation in stone or even on a parchment behind a glass frame, which
is important. In trying to publicize the commandments, the self-styled
Christian Right has essentially forgotten what they are really about. It has
also overlooked the fact that there are several different versions of them.
The King James Bible lists three: Exodus 20:2-17, Exodus 34: 12-26, and
Deuteronomy 5:6-21. Catholic Bibles and the Jewish Torah also offer
variants.

    If the commandants are indeed to be green-lighted for our official
landscape, however, let's at least remember that Christianity did not exist
when the commandments were given. It might then seem more consistent to go
with the Hebrew version rather than any modified Christian version adopted
thousands of years after Moses lived. Since the Catholic Church predates the
Protestant Reformation, it would again make more sense to go with the
Catholic version than later revisions.

    It is just this kind of theological debate which has been responsible
for massacres carried out in the name of religion over thousands of years.
It was, in fact, the mindless slaughter resulting from King Charles' efforts
to impose the Church of England's prayer book on Calvinist Scots in the 17th
century which played an important role in convincing the founding fathers to
choose a secular form of government clearly separating church and state.
They were not the first to recognize the wisdom in that approach. Jesus
Christ, after all, advised his followers to render unto Caesar what was
Caesar's due and unto God that which was due God.

    The current debate, of course, has little to do with genuine religion.
What it is really about is an effort to assert a cultural point of view. It
is part of a reaction against social change, an American counter-reformation
of sorts against the way our society has been evolving, and ultimately
against the negative fallout that is inevitable when change comes too
rapidly. The people pushing to blur the boundaries between church and state
are many of the same who so fervently back the National Rifle Association
and want to crack down on immigration. They feel that they are the ones
losing out, much as, in the Middle East, Islamic fundamentalists fear they
are losing out -- and their reactions are remarkably similar. In the Arab
Middle East and Iran, the response is an insistence on the establishment of
Islamic Law as the basis for political life; while in Israel, an
increasingly reactionary interpretation of Jewish law which, taken to
orthodox extremes, rejects marriages by reform Jewish rabbis in America, has
settled over public life.

    In a strange way, George Bush may now find himself in the same kind of
trap that ensnared Saudi Arabia's founder, King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud. To gain
political support, Saud mobilized the fanatical, ultra-religious Wahabbi
movement -- the same movement which is spiritually at the core of al-Qaeda.
Once the bargain was done, the Saudi Royal Family repeatedly found itself
held political hostage to an extremist, barely controllable movement
populated by radical ideologues. Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has
found himself in a similar situation, drawing political power from the swing
votes of the ultra-orthodox rightwing religious and fanatical settler's
movement, and then finding his options limited by their obstinacy to change.
President Bush has spent the last several months cajoling evangelicals and
trying to pay off the political bill for their support.

    In Saudi Arabia, the Wahabbis consider themselves ultra-religious, but
what really drives their passions is a deep sense of grievance and an
underlying conviction that a return to spiritual purity will restore the
lost power they believe once belonged to their forefathers. The extremism
that delights in stoning a woman to death for adultery or severing the hand
of a vagrant accused of stealing depends on extreme interpretations of texts
that are at best ambiguous. What is at stake is not so much service to God,
as convincing oneself that it is still possible to enforce draconian
discipline in a world that seems increasingly chaotic. We joke about a
hassled husband kicking his dog to show he still has power. In the Middle
East, it is often women who bear the brunt of the impotence of men. Nothing
in the Koran calls for the mistreatment of women or even asks that a woman
wear a veil. What is at stake here is not religion, but power, and who has a
right to it.

    The Christian Right, the evangelical movement that provided the added
push needed to nudge President Bush past a tight election, is equally prone
to selective interpretations of scripture. The Ten Commandments are used as
a wedge to put across what is essentially a cultural protest against social
change, but in the bitter disputes that have followed these seemingly
ridiculous arguments the message of the commandments is usually lost. The
Christian Right pretends to be concerned about the life of an unborn fetus,
but expresses little interest for the fate of the living child who emerges
from an unwanted pregnancy, and is even ready to kill or at least destroy
the careers of those who do not agree with them. Although the commandments
prohibit killing, and Christ advised his followers to leave vengeance to
God, the fundamentalists seem to delight in the death penalty, and in
reducing welfare support to unwed mothers who are struggling to deal with
the results of pregnancies that they could not control and never wanted to
have.

    In the United States as in the Middle East, the core of this Puritanism
stems from a nostalgia for an imaginary past ­ in our case, a belief that
the U.S. was a wonderful place when it was peopled mostly by pioneers who
came from good northern European stock, who knew right from wrong, and
weren't afraid to back up their beliefs with a gun, or by going to war, if
they needed to.

    The founding fathers, of course, had a very different vision. They had
seen the damage caused by the arcane disputes which triggered the religious
wars of the seventeenth century. They preferred the ideas of the secular
enlightenment, which instead of forcing men to accept the religious
interpretations of other men, provided the space and security for each man
to seek God in his own way.

    The idea that religious values should affect, and indeed control
politics, is something that you hear quite often in the Islamic world. But
perhaps the strongest rationale for separating these two dimensions of our
daily lives is that politics inevitably involves compromise, while religion
involves a spiritual ideal in which compromise can be fatal. The conflict is
easy to see in contemporary Iran. Iran's rulers have had to choose whether
they consider politics or religion to be most important. Ayatollah Khomeini
himself once stated that if forced to choose between Islamic law and Islamic
rule, he would choose Islamic rule. The effect of that decision was to
betray Islamic law and ultimately God. Iran's genuine Islamic scholars have
found themselves under continual pressure to change their understanding of
God in order to conform to political realities.

    The appointment of Ayatollah Sayyid al Khamenei to replace Khomeini as
the supreme guide, is a case in point. Khamenei's credentials as a religious
thinker are comparable to a number of other Iranian ayatollahs. But his real
power stems from his political status. Because of that, he is in a position
to affect and ultimately censor the religious writings of religious scholars
who may be more thoughtful than he is, but whose thinking is considered
threatening to Khamenei's vision of a theocratic state.

    Politics inevitably trumps religion when the two domains are merged.
Religion, when incorporated into a political structure, is almost invariably
diluted and deformed, and ultimately loses its most essential power. Worse,
as we have seen recently in the Islamic world (as in the Spanish Inquisition
and the Salem witch trials in the Christian world), a fanatical passion for
one's own interpretation of justice often leads to horror -- as in the
obsession of some practitioners of Sharia law to engage such punishments as
amputations or stoning women to death.

    The fact is that, as Saint Paul so eloquently put it, "Now we see
through a glass darkly." We have a great deal of religious experience behind
us, but only God can understand to the full extent what it really means. Men
have their interpretations, but they are only human and, by their nature,
they are flawed. We see a part of what is there -- but only a part. In that
context, isn't it best to keep our minds open, the Ten Commandants in
whatever version out of our public buildings or off our governmental lawns,
and to lead by example rather than pressuring others to see life the way we
do. As Christ once put it, "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy
brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"

    William Thatcher Dowell is the editor of the Global Beat, a review of
international security affairs published weekly over the internet by New
York University's Center for War, Peace, and the News Media. He has worked
for NBC News, ABC News, and TIME magazine. He was a Middle East
correspondent based in Cairo for TIME from 1989 through 1993.

Copyright 2005 William Thatcher Dowell
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posted March 7, 2005 at 8:24 pm
     
             
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