Snitching

In December 2004, NBA star Carmelo Anthony was seen on a DVD titled "Stop Snitching" that threatened violence on police informers in black communities. Raising a firestorm, Anthony’s presence brought media attention to what is now a thriving underground movement. "Stop Snitching" t-shirts, sold widely in urban areas, are seen by most government officials as an attempt to foil the War on Drugs. Boston mayor Thomas Menino, for example, has threatened removal of all such t-shirts from store shelves.

The current "Stop Snitching" campaign brings to the fore a tension that has always existed in American democracy: do people ultimately decide what is good for the collective or the government the people have created? A healthy disregard for authority is a key element of American identity: the United States was formed through rebellion, and such sentiment was encouraged even after the new government was formed. Thomas Jefferson, for example, noted in 1787, "The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive." The underlying principle – the government cannot always be correct in defining what is good for the collective – applies well to snitching.

Some examples are obvious in hindsight: it is standard belief, for example, that McCarthyism overreached and a refusal to inform during the Red Scare has come to be seen as noble. Mark McGwire’s recent stonewalling in the Congressional hearings on steroid use in professional baseball, on the other hand, aroused no sympathy. The current "Stop Snitching" campaign lies somewhere in the middle, and Alexandra Natapoff's recent Slate piece "Bait and Snitch" (http://www.slate.com/id/2132092) outlines the negative effects of informers on their communities.

The ambiguous morality of snitching is well captured by a few lines of a poem written by Mary MacArthur to her son Douglas MacArthur in 1901, then a West Point cadet being asked to tell on his classmates in a hazing incident gone too far.

"Remember the world will be quick with its blame
If shadow or shame ever darken your name.
Like mother like son is saying so true
The world will judge largely of mother by you.
Be this then your task, if task it shall be
To force this proud world to do homage to me."

The poem acknowledges the role of public opinion in deciding what is right or wrong – but counsels to ignore it, do what is fundamentally correct and then force public opinion through sheer will to acquiesce. Of course, there is no advice on whether to snitch or not, for that is a very personal decision.

The Islamic response echoes Mary MacArthur's, albeit removes the democratic reliance on public opinion. The only audience is God, and with a non-Caliphate government, to snitch or not to snitch is again a very personal decision. Further understanding of the Islamic perspective of the issue would also yield useful insight into the differences between Islamic governance and American democracy in terms of legitimacy of authority, the good of the collective, and the importance of conformity.

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The Mercy of Human Company

We enter and leave the world alone. The most powerful moments in life--the discovery or loss of meaning, the confrontation with mortality or with the prospect of immortality--are utterly personal experiences. At the end of the day, the things of this world are so many flies buzzing around your head. Even so (and perhaps especially so), the company of others makes the most difficult moments bearable. If you've woken up from a nightmare and sought the silent reassurance of a loved one, you know what I mean.

Aristotle argues that in the highest form of friendship a friend is "another self". Such a relationship can only mature from the long-term company of those who are your intellectual and moral peers, and is therefore restricted to at best a handful of friends. Pleasure and utility are the motivation for lesser forms of friendship, but here they are united with the mutual pursuit of the good. This is a very appealing idea to me, and gives me hope that there are other people who, via a similar itinerary of thoughts and passions, will see life as I see it. As we know from our own tradition, believers are mirrors to one another.

If that is the peak of friendship, there is also a vale. Two people who have nothing in common but blood and argument can nevertheless share something that escapes words or thoughts. Because these attachments are unconditional and nonnegotiable, no exchange is required. When I first had thoughts about the end of the world, I would fall asleep clutching and unclutching my mother's hand to let her know I was still alive. Even now, I am glad I live with my brother because he will sit with me in silence until the moment has passed.

With time, relationships that are conceived in reciprocal desire can also take on this character. Susan Sarandon's character in "Moonlight Mile" describes why she sticks out a difficult marriage in something like the following words:

"When I go to bed at night, I stick out my hand. I know when I do, no matter how cold the damn thing is, no matter how difficult it might feel, no matter how desperately we want to kill each other it's gonna be met by this warm body on the other side. To pull me out of my head, quiet the voices, save me from myself... without ever having to ask. Every night, 31 years. Every night there's my hand and every night he never lets me down."

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Background to "Bombing Without Moonlight"

This is a brief sketch of the philosophical background to Sidi Abdal-Hakim Murad's Oct 2004 article, "Bombing Without Moonlight", with a few suggestions for further reading. The original article can be read here, and I did a summary and outline in an earlier post. My own comments and questions will inshaAllah follow in a third and final post on this article.

Background

Abdal-Hakim Murad (aka Tim Winter) recasts the debate about Islam and violence as a conversation between the children (liberals) and different stepchildren (neoconservative as well as Muslim radicals) of the European Enlightenment. This is a complex argument and requires some background in the history of Western philosophy. As contested as this history is, my notes are necessarily an act of interpretation. For the sake of simplicity, I also leave out the impact of Judaism, Islam, the Renaissance and postmodernism (Islam and postmodernism are the more egregious oversights, and I may have to come back to them depending on feedback).

The Western philosophical tradition has been punctuated by three defining moments. Socrates is often taken as the starting point of Western philosophy; his student Plato and Plato’s student Aristotle are definitive of the classical period. Christianity injects something fundamentally new to this tradition. A synthesis of Christian and classical thought is definitive of the premodern (i.e., classical + medieval) period. The Enlightenment rejects both premodern philosophy and religion, and is definitive of the modern period. Insofar as philosophy is a conversation about possibilities, these are not simply historical periods that succeed each other, but can be seen as alternative paradigms that have been more or less compelling at different points in time.

The Enlightenment sets science in opposition to religion and other structures of traditional authority, and seeks to establish society on entirely rational foundations. Universal reason replaces myth, faith, custom et al. Contemporary liberals are the inheritors of this political project. Individual agency is central: the greater the realm of individual freedoms and the greater the equality between individuals, the better a society we have.

Critics of the Enlightenment have taken different forms: political and social conservatives, theologians, Marxists, feminists and others. Depending on the critic, liberalism is either too much or not enough of a good thing. Some of these critics are in fact beneficiaries of the Enlightenment—hence the idea of the Enlightenment’s stepchildren.

What does this have to do with the ethics of suicide militancy? If you are interested in figuring out what sort of thinking produces suicide militancy, it may be sufficient to look at whom suicide bombers read at night, whom those thinkers read and so on. AH Murad does some of that in his article. But if you are also interested in what sort of thinking makes it possible, and furthermore what sort of thinking can effectively combat it, then you need to look at the wider history of philosophy. From this perspective, the following narrative may be instructive:

Socratic philosophy introduced a tension between the good and one’s own—i.e., what is good for my family, tribe or city vs. what is objectively good. Monotheism radicalized this tension by making us all accountable to a just God and not to our particular communities. The Enlightenment took this yet a step further by enshrining reason as the basis of community, while severing its link to divine accountability. Of course, if universal reason is thrown into doubt (either because the truth does not exist or because the official version of the truth marginalizes other points of view), you have neither custom nor faith to fall back on. That’s where we stand today.

Suggested Reading

AH Murad. "Faith in the Future: Islam after the Enlightenment" and “Unpacking Islam”

John Gray. Al-Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern
(discussed in AH Murad’s article)

Allan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind
(a brilliant, provocative history and indictment of American liberalism)

Richard Rorty. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity
(a good introduction to the type of postmodernism Murad opposes)

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Learning from a Bigot

When I hear about accusations of misogyny against figures in the Islamic tradition, I find it instructive to compare this to my reactions to unpalatable statements from giants in the history of Western philosophy. Talking about a different intellectual tradition has the advantage of unpacking the issue at hand with minimal offense. So when a discussion about a major classical Islamic scholar's views on women came up on the MEISGS (Middle East and Islamic Studies Graduate Students) discussion list, that's the approach I took.

When I come across a statement from the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche or Heidegger that rubs me the wrong way, I ask myself two questions:

1) Why is this offensive to me?

I see two possibilities here: a) because it conflicts with my fundamental convictions, and b) because it conflicts with the fundamental assumptions of the intellectual culture I live in. Usually it's both, but I'm surprised at how often it's the second. Insofar as the prevailing intellectual culture is liberalism, the real criteria of taking offense are equality and freedom. Nietzsche's misogyny pales in comparison to his blasphemy, but only one of them is
considered seriously offensive to the 'intelligent' reader.

2) How does it affect my ability to take this scholar seriously?

People typically go one of two ways here:

a) since this person is my hero, i'll either agree with what he just said or pretend he never said it;
b) this person is a mysogynist, racist, classist homophobe and is therefore no longer worth reading (the dead white man critique, the Muslim version of which is "I'm not going to take my deen from a bigot")

In commenting on Heidegger's Nazism, I remember Wendy Doniger (a University of Chicago scholar on religion) suggesting a third approach:

c) without condoning his less palatable views, we should "glide past" them in order to benefit from his other, more important, views.

This approach makes it possible to learn from people we cannot afford to remove from our shelf (Heidegger is arguably the most significant philosopher of the twentieth century), but is nevertheless unsatisfying to me. I would rather like to think it possible to:

d) confront these statements regardless of the discomfort in creates us. We may ultimately disagree with them--which may lead us back to (b) or (c). But I think it's telling how often the problem we have with a text (returning to my first question) is its disagreement with liberalism's fundamental assumptions. What do you do with Plato's inegalitarianism when it's central to his worldview--i.e., that equality is simply incompatible with human excellence? You can't embrace it, you can't ignore it, you can't dismiss it, and you can't glide past it (particularly if Plato is your favorite philosopher). Perhaps, just perhaps, you can learn something from it.

So what does all of this have to do with classical Islamic scholarship? I haven't thought this through past the connections that are immediately evident. At the risk of saying something highly offensive or problematic, let me nonetheless share the following provisional thoughts. As was pointed out by others on the discussion list, it's not enough to say that Shaykh X is one of the most respected and beloved figures in our tradition (which he may well be, but this doesn't make him immune from criticism). If I want to take his normative claims seriously, simply attributing them to his specific time and culture seems like another cop-out.

By the same token, however, I can't possibly reject every pejorative statement in a tradition that extends well beyond liberalism's presuppositions. Taking offense is necessarily a subjective matter, and to take someone's normative claims seriously also requires me to scrutinize my own reactions. (Why must everything be reduced to freedom and equality?)

Again, I don't know where this ultimately takes us, but it does indicate the nub of the problem.

(I'm reminded here of the pastor (one of Eddie Murphy's many characters) in Coming to America: "I love the Lord! I love the Lord! And if lovin' the Lord is wrong, I don't wanna be right!")

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