"...when deep inside you there is a loaded gun, how can you have God?"
--Kabir
It never ceases to amaze me how people who have absolutely no training in my area of scholarly specialization feel free--no, entitled--to wax learnedly about matters of which they know less than nothing. Half-truths, bigotry, theology passed-off as social science, hoary canards...
Wow. I've heard it all. Or at least a lot of it.
But in the past few days I was treated to an exceptional display of hate-speech proffered as historical evidence. The culprit in this case will remain anonymous and I will omit any description here of the aggressive posture he assumed during our private conversation--a tactic that I assume was designed to intimidate me, since he had neither logical argument nor evidence at his command to support his position. But, man, was he creepy. Elmer Gantry with a Ph.D.
I have discovered, to my chagrin, that I possess an uncanny ability to "out" Islamophobes. I am not at all certain how I acquired this peculiar talent. I suspect that, given my obvious Anglo ancestry and ethnicity, my educational attainments and intellect, I arouse certain expectations in people. Those who walk around with a loaded gun in their hearts assume that, after I recite all of the polite qualifications and disclaimers about Islam and Muslims that the present climate of political correctness is deemed to require, I will naturally fall in line and do my "duty" and ratify the prevailing cultural consensus that Islam is somehow, at bottom,
defective as a moral tradition.
The nature of this defect--obvious to some people--is that Islamic tradition predisposes a certain percentage of its adherents to violence. The flip-side of this presumption is that Christianity predisposes a certain percentage of its adherents to meekness and non-violence.
When I decline to ratify either of these views--but particularly the former--I am frequently greeted with reactions that range from annoyance to petulance. And when, on the contrary, I affirm Islam as deserving serious consideration
as a religious and moral tradition--on par with any other--the petulance can occasionally explode into rage.
As an historian of religion, I am precluded from adopting any predispositional view. The weight of historical evidence demolishes any claim that Islam (or any other religion) predisposes its adherents to violence or non-violence. But if, for the sake of argument, I were to adopt a predispositionalist view, I would have to couple it--for the sake of intellectual honesty--with the opinion that the tradition in question is a failure: because no one can predict that any given individual will exhibit violent or non-violent behavior in a given set of circumstances on the basis of her or his confessional affiliation.
To affirm otherwise is simply to attempt to pass-off theology as social science. My advice to any and all who wish to traffic in such a scurrile pastime: don't go there. Intellectual integrity is a terrible thing to waste.
