interview with Sayyed Mohammad Ali El Husseini

Michael Totten interviews the soft-spoken moderate Shia cleric at his home in Lebanon. There is much wisdom that Sayyid Husseini has to offer, such as:

“I believe that plenty of the Western people believe that there are two kinds of people,” Husseini said. “Some who believe in peace and God and some that believe in violence and the devil. While I was in Germany, I met a student. He told me that I am a Muslim, that I am a terrorist. I told him that he is the German, that he burned people. I said Why are you talking to me? I didn’t burn anybody. I told him also that I didn’t terrorize anybody, and that I was the first person to condemn what Osama bin Laden did to America on 9/11. I told him that we, the Shia people, in Iraq we were the first victims. Saddam killed civilian people, he cut off our heads, he blew up our houses. I told him that Hitler burned the Jews. Nobody in the world has done what he did. Then I told him we are the same. You are German, and you are not Hitler. I am a Muslim, but I am not Osama bin Laden.”

However, Michael has his own insights as well:

It’s extraordinary how the violent extremists of the Middle East have managed to portray themselves as mainstream in front of Westerners. In some countries, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, perhaps at least the passive supporters of Islamists really are mainstream. In most places, though, they are not. Religiously moderate Muslims are easy to find in the Middle East, especially in modern countries like Turkey and Lebanon. But they get precious little attention in the media. Those with the rocket launchers and the self-detonation belts are more newsworthy and get much more press.

This is why demands of moderate muslims to somehow account for or do something about the extremists are so misguided. Read Totten's entire interview with Husseini - it's a fantastic interview. And support Michael's travels in the Middle East as well.

a war of ideas?

One of the writers at RedState, representative of the general conservative Republican community as a whole, has posed several questions to muslims. I have decided to cross-post my reply to him here.

will you meet my proclamation by engaging me in respectful civil truth-seeking dialogue or will you brand as infidel and censure me?

you mean, with regard to your proclamation of disbelief in the Prophet SAW? Neither. I will just invoke Qur'an 109:6. It may shock you, but I honestly don't care what you believe, or don't believe.

Will you be partner in the valuation of religious liberty, and the defense of all individuals from discrimination for particular theological belief, or will you [irrelevant nonsense]

the premise of this question is insulting. Still, I will reply. I will certainly continue to defend the principles of freedom of religion and speech, and furthermore I will not make my defense of these principles contingent upon reciprocation by you - because at this time it appears to me that there are those who are willing and eager to cast aside those very same principles in a heartbeat should it serve their purposes.

Will you engage me, condemn me, defend me, silence me or remain silent?

I will reply to reasonable questions about my faith - MY time permitting. I will not debate that faith. I will not answer accusations or respond if you demand I condemn something for condemnations' sake.

I will reply to those who treat me as an equal, as a independent human being of shared humanity, as a fellow citizen and a patriot. In fact I have not been silent over these past four years, and I am hardly alone.

I want to KNOW! But not only that, WE need to know! We NEED to insure that no one who makes partners with us on the bargain of religious liberty is hurt by those who make partners against us.

I cannot help you if you choose to be blind. I have given you numerous examples here that if you choose to follow, may open your eyes to see just how much of a natural alliance we are predisposed to. It is MY people, not yours, who suffer the most grievously at the hands of our common enemy. If there is only one place you go, then go here, and you will find answers you seek. But I will not spoon feed you further.

this day I have perfected your religion for you

"This day have I perfected for you your religion and completed My favor on you and chosen for you Islam as a religion."

-- Qur'an 5:3, revealed upon the plain at Ghadir e Khum

Today is Eid al-Ghadir, the day that the Prophet SAW declared, of Ali ibn Talib,

man kunto mawlahu fa' Aliyan mawlahu

The exhaustively well-documented events at Ghadir-e-Khum resonate within the Shi'a breast - this is a day of renewal, of fealty, of expression. It is truly the cornerstone of the edifice of faith. To all who honor this day, I say Eid Mubarak, and present with humility the qasida of Syedna Taher Saifuddin AQ:

madihokumu ya ala fatema-tal-ridha
ila suhekum li khairo hadin va sa'eki

The Appeal to Other Ways of Knowing

In a conversation elsewhere, someone implied that an argument that appeals to "other ways of knowing" (besides the scientific method) is essentially fallacious. Let's acronize the Appeal to Other Ways of Knowing as AOWK for brevity's sake. Now, there certainly are times when an AOWK is a fallacious argument; one example might be, "You're wrong because it says so in the Bible/Qur'an/...". Such a statement certainly qualifies as a belief, but not as an argument in the context of a debate. Many of my own axioms about the universe are indeed defined by precisely such statements, but I would not presume to try and employ such a statement in a discussion with an atheist about the existence of God.

However, it's equally false to simply assert that all AOWK are automatically false, because there are in fact many ways of "Knowing" besides the scientific method. A variant of the "AOWK fallacy" fallacy is presented by another blogger "Skeptico" here, as follows:

Here is another fallacious argument skeptics will have heard:

>> There are ways of knowing other than the scientific one

or

>> The scientific method is not the only source of truth

..or similar wording. It is an appeal to other ways of knowing apart from science. The claim is that the tools of critical thinking and science are not sufficient to evaluate the believer’s claim; therefore the believer's claim has validity despite the lack of evidence for it.

The flaw in the argument

No one is claiming that science has all the answers or is always right. However, science has proved to be the most reliable method we know for evaluating claims and figuring out how the universe works. If the believer is claiming that there is a better method, it is up to him or her to justify that claim. To demonstrate this, believers need to explain their better method for evaluating claims, and provide evidence that it is indeed a better method. If they cannot do this their appeal to other ways of knowing is vacuous and fallacious.

Emphasis above differs from the original. Let's start with their definition of AOWK. I think it's pretty obvious that there are ways of knowing other than the scientific one. And that it's fairly obvious that the scientific method is not the only source of truth. Example: My knowledge that my love for my wife and child exists today is acquired without the scientific method, and the scientific method cannot explain why that love endures. Another example is in chaotic systems, which are ostensibly deterministic but elude rigorous predictive description. We can forecast the weather and the stock market, but we cannot truly predict it. The various industries that have sprung up about these disciplines rely on interpolation from past observations, not a total characterization of future behavior. In a nutshell, stochastic phenomena are beyond the Zen of science, and lie more in the realm of probability and uncertainty - and this fuzziness is hard-wired into the fundamental substrate of the Universe itself, much to the consternation of great minds like Einstein himself.

Likewise, it is simply true that sometimes, the tools of critical thinking and science are indeed insufficient to evaluate a given claim. This too has basis in fundamental reality; Gödel's Theorem has profound implications on the boundaries of reason^[1]. In a nutshell, Gödel's Theorem states that for any rational construct of axioms and theorems, there are always statements that can be neither proved nor disproved. Or as Jones and Wilson put it,

You might be able to prove every conceivable statement about numbers within a system by going outside the system in order to come up with new rules and axioms, but by doing so you'll only create a larger system with its own unprovable statements. The implication is that all logical system of any complexity are, by definition, incomplete; each of them contains, at any given time, more true statements than it can possibly prove according to its own defining set of rules.

The main thrust of Skeptico's argument however is that he requires someone who believes something to be true to provide evidence that the mechanism by which they believe is superior to science. It is not clear to me how a given system for evaluating a statement can be said to be "better" or "worse" then another in a quantitative and meaningful way. What is the metric? Skeptico seems to implicitly assume that an answer arrived at via science is inherently rigorous, but that's not the case. Example: Neither Newtonian mechanics nor Relativity suffice to describe the N-body problem. However, they do represent stages of an asymptotically improving model of the Universe. But for such a model to accurately encompass the totality of complexity within the Universe, you'd need a model as complex as the Universe itself. Hence, you can never be sure that the truth you are describing via Science is as immutable as Truth. This anti-dogmatic trait of the scientific method is a strength, not a weakness^[2].

Therefore, the demand that an AOWK be supported with "evidence" of superiority to science is a standard that science itself can not meet. A hypothetical example might be a meeting some centuries ago between someone who empirically shows that the planets revolve around the earth, and a scientist who has a mathematical model for a heliocentric universe. Based on the evidence that both bring to the table, neither can say with certainty who is correct. That we accept heliocentrism today is because we do have Relativity to explain the discrepancies of Newtonian mechanics, satellite observations, etc. But simple skepticism is not enough by itself to disprove the AOWK - the best you can say is that there is room for disagreement. The only time a scientific argument can "win" is if the latter has direct evidence disproving the claims of the other. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - and to claim otherwise is to make a fallacy of one's own: the Argument from Ignorance.


[1] Also see these previous posts: Waiting for Gödel, the falsity of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, and Flew's Wager; also see the evolving conversation at Super-rational blog.

[2] Highly relevant here is Thomas Kuhn's philosophy of "paradigm shifts" within scientific orthodoxy as occurring as "revolutions" rather than an incremental accumulation of knowledge. One case study is the theory of plate tectonics: Alfred Wegener first observed evidence for what he called "continental drift" as far back as 1915 but faced extreme resistance by the scientific community, who held to a more static view of the earth with change primarily driven by heating and cooling cycles. Today there is virtually no one who does not accept plate tectonics as the unifying model of geologic change.

Saddam

In a nutshell: Good riddance.

With respect to timing, however, it was a complete mess. By executing Saddam so close to Eid al Adha, they played into his own desire for martyrdom status, and exacerbated the Shi'a-Sunni tensions already so raw in civil-war-torn Iraq.

For what it's worth, note that Saddam was hanged, so any attempt to link his execution to the act of zabihat is nonsense. This was an execution of a criminal, and anyone who tries to argue that the date of same is somehow an insult to Islam is giving Saddam a completely unwarranted religious validation. Had Saddam been beheaded, the analogy might have some grounding, but as it was, Saddam was hardly the first devil to die and won't be the last. That's the only lesson to take: Saddam was executed by his nation for crimes against his own people. That's another reason to celebrate on Eid al Adha.

The Qur'an is not a puppet-master

"The possibilities in Arabic for the use of figurative language are endless; its allusiveness, tropes and figures of speech place it far beyond the reach of any other language... Arabic loses on translation but all other languages gain on being translated into Arabic."

-- Joel Carmichael, The Shaping of the Arabs (1967)

Arabic is a tremendously complex language, which means that the Qur'an is a subtle text. Those who translate the text into English and those who interpret the text literally are in essence committing the same sin of truncation - they are taking something three-dimensional and reducing it to two. That missing dimension is the cultural and symbolic context which the writer in Arabic embeds his words - a rich layer of meaning that is inferred rather than simply transcribed.

The specific way in which this occurs is difficult to explain. Blogger H.D. Miller described it thus:

individual Arabic words are formed from simple three letter roots. To these simple roots suffixes, prefixes, and infixes are added, and vowels are changed to produce a large number of individual words which have, either actually or metaphorically, meanings somehow related to the idea behind the simple root. For example, the Arabic root k-t-b is expressed as a verbal infinitive as kataba, meaning "to write". From that basic root we can then get the words kitab "book", kAtib "writer", maktUb "written" (with a metaphorical meaning of "predestined"), maktab "office", maktaba "library", makAtaba "correspondence", kutubi "bookseller", kuttAb "elementary school", istiktAb "dictation", makAtib "correspondent" or "reporter", muktatib "subscriber", and about a hundred more variations all produced from that original three letter root.

All of the words springing from the triliteral root k-t-b have that similar three letter sound to bind them together, which means that each of the words shaped from the root, when spoken, are capable of evoking any of the other words shaped from that same root. To this, an extra layer of complexity and evocativeness is added by the fact that many of the Arabic consonants sound remarkably similar, so that there are two h's, one "hard" and one "soft", two s's, two t's and so on. This means that when you say k-t-b you're also evoking q-t-b "hunch" as in "hunchback", q-T-b (with the "hard" T ) which gives the root meaning of "to gather or collect", and about a dozen other groups of words. To the native speaker all of these various meanings resonate at either the conscious or unconscious level. This is what I mean when I speak of evocative and allusive, this feature of Arabic which links together hundreds of words, many of them with very different meanings.

This is why any theological interpretation of the Qur'an that starts from an English translation as its source text is immediately invalid. English translations exist, of course, and are not in themselves harmful. In fact they are valuable in providing the baseline meaning from which one can proceed with tafsir (interpretation). However if you begin and end your scholarship of the Qur'an with the translation alone, then you are not talking about Islam. You are talking about a reflection of Islam as seen from the translator's eyes, filtered through your own biases.

For example, three well-known translations are by M.H. Shakir, Abdullah Yusufali, and Marmaduke Pickthall. Consider the differences in their translations for Qur'an 3:23:

003.023

YUSUFALI: Hast thou not turned Thy vision to those who have been given a portion of the Book? They are invited to the Book of Allah, to settle their dispute, but a party of them Turn back and decline (The arbitration).

PICKTHAL: Hast thou not seen how those who have received a portion of the Scripture invoke the Scripture of Allah (in their disputes) that it may judge between them; then a faction of them turn away, being opposed (to it)?

SHAKIR: Have you not considered those (Jews) who are given a portion of the Book? They are invited to the Book of Allah that it might decide between them, then a part of them turn back and they withdraw.

Immediately we see that Yusufali interprets this as a faction that has declined arbitration via the Qur'an, whereas Pickthal sees the rejection as outright opposition to the Qur'an. Meanwhile Shakir interprets the passage as applying specifically to Jews, even though in the actual Arabic there is no specific mention of Jews aka "Yahudi" or the tribe of Banu Israel therein. Each of these writers carries baggage with them and that shapes how they interpret the passage. By cementing the passage into english, the meaning is rendered static. All the allusiveness that Miller described is irrecovably lost.

This is not to say that muslims don't adopt such strict interpretations as valid. The problem here is that most muslims simply don't have time or knowledge to go through the Qur'an line by line and translate the text. This creates an opening for those with agenda to define the faith and wrap their own biases in Qur'anic legitimacy.

While I certainly believe that there is a "correct" interpretation of the Qur'an, the fact remains that Islam is a living religion. But he who interprets the Qur'an in the worst possible light is no more representative of Islam than he who interprets it in the best. Since we have empirical evidence that one billion muslims worldwide have not risen up in slaughter against their non-muslim neighbors, and that the actual number of muslims who interpret the Qur'an to justify violence is a tiny percentage of the total number of believers, there's nothing innate about Islam or the verses of the Qur'an that leads to such behaviors. Anyone who asserts, for example, that verse X:YY of the Qur'an permits muslims to lie to unbelievers (taqqiya), for example, is making a factually untrue statement. The correct statement would be that such a verse has been used to justify lying to non-believers, but until such time as someone proves that a significant fraction of muslims habitually lie in such fashion, it's merely an anecdote, not an observation with any kind of predictive power.

The average muslim does not walk under a cloud of Qur'an ayats burned into his brain, dictating their every move. Muslims interact with others based on the same types of prejudices, experiences, good and bad knowledge that everyone else carries. The Qur'an is a generalized influence, but not the sole one and ccertainly not a specific one. While I certainly wish I could carry the entirety of the Qur'an in my brain and have relevant ayats appear in memory as life proceeds apace, it's simply not possible. Rather, I recite the Qur'an in Arabic as a duty and base my relationships with my community on the sermons and teachings of my authorities and role models. And sometimes quote it on blogs in responses to someone (usually non-muslim) telling me what Islam really is.

changes afoot

First off - the results of the Brass Crescent Awards have been announced. Yes, I am extremely tardy in announcing it here but I was too busy announcing it everywhere else :)

I know that things have been slow around here. That's because I am planning on making some changes after the new year. I am going to be relying more on del.icio.us as an engine for the content I post here, and will be changing the layout of the blog a bit accordingly. The basic idea is to make the two feeds from the Carnival of Brass - at present relegated to the sidebar - more central. I will still blog here but that will just be part of the daily content.

My purpose is to basically create a sort of "mini-portal" that will serve as a general resource in terms of highlighting analysis and opinions by experts and other bloggers that you wouldn't normally be exposed to via the media, on the issues of the day. That takes some pressure off as well and lets me allocate more time to other projects.

I'll start making the changes after the holidays. Until then, happy new year, merry Christmas and Hanukkah, and good Festivus to you all.