[Given the understandable reluctance of Weblog readers to comment on this post, I reprint it here, since I'm interested in how people feel about this question. Plus, I think it's one of the most provocative (in a good way) things I've written of late, and don't want it buried so quickly. Plus I'm the chef and today's Thanksgiving, so I've been busy all day injecting butter into turkey and fixing fixins for the feast.]
The current issue of The New York Review of Books contains two jarringly complementary articles. The first is Frederick Crews' review
[subscribers only] of Andrew Delbanco's critical biography of Melville.
Delbanco treats Melville as "one of those writers whom Lionel Trilling
described as 'repositories of the dialectics of their times' in the
sense that they contain 'both the yes and no of their culture.'" Thus:
Respect
for the past, in Delbanco's case, includes eschewing the revisionists'
"gotcha!" approach to a dead author's limitations and instead trying to
recreate the dilemmas that he faced. On the pivotal issue of
abolitionism, for example, Delbanco doesn't buy the crude idea that
Melville's reluctance to become an activist was motivated by a wish to
avoid offending his benefactor and kin, Judge Shaw. No one in
Melville's day could envision how the slaves might be emancipated
without causing secession. Although the novelist made it plain that he
detested slavery, he joined the great majority of his Northern
compatriots in hoping to avoid the gruesome war that would soon cost
over 600,000 American lives. To condemn him with the hindsight of 150
years, Delbanco would doubtless say, is simply to reveal one's own
failure of historical imagination.
This is not historicism
for historicism's sake, according to Delbanco, but historicism in the
service of moral and political complexity. Read in his original
context, Melville should not be censured for his failure to condemn
slavery because the experience of living in a tumultuous time includes
"both the yes and no of [a] culture." Normally I find this
quasi-æstheticist pose painfully insufficient—a flaccid defense of New
Critical orthodoxy—but another article in the current NYRB suggests the insufficiency of my own pose.
William Dalrymple's "Inside the Madrasa" [free content] opens with the following anecdote:
Here,
straddling the noisy, truck-thundering Islamabad highway, stands the
Haqqania, one of the most radical of the religious schools called
madrasas.
Many of the Taliban leaders, including Mullah Omar,
were trained at this institution. If its teachings have been blamed for
inspiring the brutal, ultra-conservative incarnation of Islamic law
that that regime presided over, there is no sign that the Haqqania is
ashamed of its former pupils: instead, the madrasa's director, Maulana
Sami ul-Haq, still proudly boasts that whenever the Taliban put out a
call for fighters, he would simply close down the madrasa and send his
students off to fight. In many ways, then, Akora Khattack represents
everything that US policymakers most fear and dislike in this region, a
bastion of religious, intellectual, and sometimes—in the form of the
Taliban—military resistance to Pax Americana and all it represents.
This
account of Pakistani madrasas squares with what I've read for the past
four or five years; namely, that they're Saudi-financed fundamentalist
schools in which the indoctrination of radical Islamic thought occurs
daily. Then Dalrymple begins to hedge:
It is certainly
true that many madrasas are fundamentalist and literalist in their
approach to the scriptures and that many subscribe to the most
hard-line strains of Islamic thought. Few make any effort to prepare
their students to function in a modern, plural society. It is also true
that some madrasas can be directly linked to Islamic radicalism and
occasionally to outright civil violence.
No only do high
profile radicals "function in a modern, plural society," they do so
with aplomb. Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's chief of staff, was a
pediatric surgeon; the average madrasa student learns medicine from
Galen. Mohammed Atta was an architect; the average madrasa student
learns geometry from Euclid. (Did someone say something about a
stalking-horse?) Dalrymple's point, Madrasas are not breeding grounds for fundamentals and terrorists, the Haqqania and its ilk notwithstanding. They are
institutional bulwarks against radical textual interpretation, focusing
on "the correct fulfillment of rituals, how to wash correctly before
prayers, and the proper length to grow a beard." To wit:
[S]hortly
after September 11, bin Laden told a group of visiting Saudis that the
"youths who conducted the operations did not accept any fiqh [school of Islamic law] in the popular term, but they accepted the fiqh
that the Prophet Muhammad brought." It is a telling quote: bin Laden
showing his impatience with legal training and the inherited structures
of Islamic authority. The hijackers, he implied, were taking effective
practical action rather than sitting around discussing legal texts. As
such he set himself up as a challenge to the madrasas and the ulema, bypassing traditional modes of religious study and looking directly to the Koran for guidance.
Unlike
Omar Sheikh, the London School of Economics graduate who kidnapped
Daniel Pearl, the man who spends hours studying "the proper length to
grow a beard" will not think to question the Koranic code taught to him
at a madrasa. He will consider text and tradition inviolate elements of
a culture of faith, whereas the Englishman who comes to Islam late in
life will consider the text itself inviolate. Of course, the average
Englishman lives a kingly life compared to that of the impoverished
madrasa student. And with this I return to Melville and Deblanco and
ask:
Should we advocate the modernization of Islamic culture or should we support a return to traditionalism?
A
century from now, the answer to this question will be obvious. It will
possess the same clarity which encourages condemnations of historical
figures for their "patent" moral or political "lapses." But for the
life of me, I don't know what it is.
, er, 
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