The book burning that never was...

The book burning was never going to happen. The CIA would have ensured a car accident if the guy hadn’t backed down. America may be weakened these days, but it can put its house in order when it needs to. Social panic over nothing...

Meanwhile, there is another side to all this, and I say this as a friend of Islam and someone who has an immense respect for Islamic culture and the debt the West owes to the House of Wisdom in Baghdad (and the other great Islamic universities that transferred and developed on lost classical knowledge over 1,000 years ago – Cordoba etc.) While the Bible does have its simple minded literalists (far too many of them in our beloved Nigeria), there are long and rich traditions of understanding the metaphorical/archetypal power of its many texts. And while there are many Christians who would rather dwell on the magical power of Jesus in turning a few fish into many, there are equally powerful traditions who have long since put away a childish belief in magic and understand the power of parables – in the case of the feeding of the 5000: about how we can always be more generous than we think we can.

Metaphorical truth is always more powerful than literal truth: as anyone who has delved into proverbial wisdom of any ancient culture will know.

In fact, this takes us back to Islamic thought. The very possibility of a Renaissance and then of an Enlightenment in the West came thanks to Islamic scholars such as Averroes claiming that the world of reason is equally valid to the realm of faith (an incredibly dangerous thought for many periods in all three Abrahamic faiths) - then spending his life interpreting and developing the thought of Aristotle – at a time when Europe was awash with Vandals and Visigoths with long beards growling at each other around open fires in the forest. It is the Renaissance-Enlightenment trajectory that fundamentally challenged the institutionalised dogmatic violence of the Vatican – and the fuel for both was Islamic classical thought from a millennia ago. What they don’t teach you when doing a philosophy degree in the West is how much Thomas Aquinas ‘borrowed’ his thinking from Averroes...

For a variety of reasons, Islam didn’t build on the Abbasid legacy (we have Ghengis Khan to ‘thank’ for this) and Islam has yet to go through this process of enlightenment. Any institution, no matter how large or small, can get captured by conservative forces and regress. The Koran (and the other great Islamic texts) currently remain vulnerable to an over-determined literal interpretation – despite all the obvious (and less obvious) internal fractures of Islamic scholarship within and among Muslim populations. There is good cause to believe that the modernising process is actually happening right now – Islam’s enlightenment. The Islamic fundamentalism that looms so large as an archetype of fear in many westerner’s eyes is in reality a very weak movement in comparison. There is no hope of a new Caliphate (the dream of a history that never was). Al Qaeda is not a serious threat to any large western city any more. The vast majority of muslims form part of this modernising moment within Islam. We can witness it in Saudi Arabia. We can see it in Morocco. It would be more prevalent still had American foreign policy not made such a disastrous mistake in Afghanistan in funding the Mujahadeen and the ISI. What we fear as Islamic fundamentalism is very much a product of failed American foreign policies. Do your research.

Westerner’s with sub-conscious fears or prejudices about Islam (and non-Westerners buying into the fear-matrix) really need to learn a bit of history before they mouth off too much. They need to know a little about Christianity’s ultraviolent and dogmatic past, and they need to realise the debt Western culture owes to Islam and they need to know who and what the CIA funded in its proxy wars against the Russians in the 1970s and 1980s.

Nuff said.