Anybody, with the ambition to be like Obama in 2008 presented himself as being, i.e. post-partisan and post-racial, can't but hope for his defeat in November.
I know of course that, to be elected, most of the time candidates show themselves to be better than they are, and promise more than they can maintain. Rarely, though, the way they present themselves has been as in the case of Obama so far from reality.
He has revealed himself strongly partisan and racially biased toward the father side of his being.
His supporters will object that it was his opponents' fault, forcing him into partisanship. And I will answer that this is a partisan way of reasoning.
To be post-partisan means to be able to assuage partisan contrasts, and so it goes for being post-racial. It requires to be utterly partisan not to see that the failure to do so means a lack of capability, or, worse, of will. In one way or the other such a lack made Obama's self-presentation in 2008 a total lie.
HP
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
The Islamic dilemma
The Islamic world
is afire. Off against America, and what it means in the mind of the rioters and
those who inspire them.
We are told: these
are extremists, not really representing Islam. See how their own Islamic
governments try to keep them in check. Even the highest Saudi religious
authority denounced present day violence as un-Islamic. Besides, we offended
their feelings.
What to think about
it? How to get around in order to judge who is right about the legitimacy, from
the Islamic point of view, of such violent reactions to the news of words and
images demeaning of the figure of the man held to be the Prophet? No
more than news, mind, for people who hardly have the chance to hear or see
them, rumors spread on purpose by those interested in making havoc against
America. Again, we might ask how proper this is from an Islamic point of view.
I must say: don't
look for an answer by reading the Qur’an. You may doubt that, staying to it,
the so called extremists are right.
In respect for
Islam, I must recognize that it is, after all, a widely spread civilizational
reality of about 1400 years, a span of time over which quite different claims
have been advanced in its name. For what I know, then, the Islamic world isn't
one coherent block, but it is a very diversified reality. Everywhere, it seems,
the Qur’an is read as God's word dictated to Mohammad, but according to the
time and the place different things have been read into it. I don't have the
competence to deny that they are there, but I have enough confidence in my own
capability of reading and understanding what is prima facie written (if
translations are granted validity). And before the Qur’an I am perplexed.
First of all, the
chapters of the Qur’an, which bear the Arabic name of sura, are
assembled according to the utterly extrinsic criterion of their length. Which
is very confusing, especially if we consider the importance of chronology
according to the same Qur’an: so that, where they diverge, the later suras
supersede the early ones. But this is the least of problems, which can be
easily overcome with a textual guide informing on the chronological sequence.
The perplexity comes from elsewhere.
What I find,
starting from the earlier suras, is the witness of a man who has an
experience of the absolute sovereignty of God, or, in slightly different words,
a vision of an utterly transcendent Sovereign, who is speaking to him. Nothing
strange for me in this. I know it from all historical evidence, that everywhere
men experience in society the sense of a whole that transcends them, and that
someone among them represents it by referring beyond himself. I also know, from
experience, that in writing I have no control on words, which come or don't come
to me, are dictated, so to speak, from elsewhere. The same it is witnessed, for
example, in the Homeric poems with the invocation to the divine Muses, or also,
but without the Muses' mediation, when the inspiration is perceived as coming
immediately from the one source of all things, such as the divine Lord of the
Bible. Nothing peculiar in this, therefore, with the Qur’an. The claim of
“prophecy” any one advances is though open to controversy, and peculiar to the Qur’an
is the way the contrast arising from it is maintained absolutely raw.
From earlier to
later suras, it is a crescendo. The voice speaking in the Qur’an,
traditionally identified as that of Mohammad, while on one side presents the
speaker as being addressed by another voice, that speaks to him in sovereign
fashion, and at times merges with it, addresses on the other its audience with the authority coming from
that. The audience it addresses is at the beginning universal, and it remains
such, on the background, throughout. But it is addressed to determine a choice,
pro or against the message brought forth, and so at a certain pont the audience
is split, between those who have accepted the speaker's authority and those who
have rejected it. Prima facie, which is as far as my reading goes, the
theological message is pretty simple, somewhat like what remains of
Christianity by the hands of some modern philosophers: there is one God, only
sovereign to whom all men are subjected, to be judged by the end of time. Here
comes the division of the audience, between the deniers, who have refused
subjection (in Arabic islam), and those who accepted it. To the firsts,
who are ironically made to speak in the moment of judgment as looking for
excuses, none is granted and are destined to the fire of hell, while the
expectation for the seconds is life in beautiful gardens. Hence the speaking
voice expands in giving a thorough vision of history, made with materials
widely drawn from the Jewish Bible, by which it is shown that to all people
have been continuously sent messengers to call them back on the right way of
“subjection”, whom they refused to listen to or did it just for a short time.
In addressing those who have accepted “subjection”, the voice becomes then that
of a lawgiver. A main law of purity appears to be given, and it is that of not
mingling with the deniers, who, by refusing subjection, have excluded
themselves from the common humanity of the universal audience to whom the
message is addressed. Killing them is therefore allowed, if not even, as in the
awful verse 5 of sura IX, prescribed.
What to think of
all this?
That Muslims find themselves at
a crossroad. A big dilemma. I know, I said, that much more has been read in the
letter of the Qur’an than what I just referred. But this happened inside the umma,
as they call the community of the faithful, once it was established, history
teaches, by way of conquest. Done, it looks, following the prescription of the
founder. Now days, though, Muslims are no longer living within an umma
territorially severed from other people, literally or even when belonging to
Islamic countries, because of the wider world of planetary communications in
which we are all involved. Either then they interpret away that kind of prescriptions,
and learn how to promote the deeper universal content of their teaching in a
different way, out of the raw logic of contrasting claims with no other
solution than the subjection of one to the other; or they maintain it to the
ultimate consequences. But, to follow the first path, might mean simply to
cease to be Muslims in a traditional sense. So, while avoiding such a
conclusion, but seemingly not wanting to follow the second path either, easily
they engender a suspicion of
dissimulation.
HP
Labels:
salus mundi
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