Islam's Sensitive Side

A future Pesh Merga commander in Iraqi Kurdistan
(Photo by Founders' Porch.)

Founders' Porch reports  from the Former Axis of Evil

Army sergeant majors like to joke about expensive military-issued “sensitive items” being worth more than soldiers themselves.  But that humor might not translate in Afghanistan, judging by the collective reaction to 1) the US Army’s accidental burning of the nation’s top “sensitive item,” and 2) the stalking and murder of sleeping families by a US Army soldier in Kandahar.  The former event had the Afghan people in near revolutionary furor, leaving 40 dead (including American soldiers killed by trusted Afghan trainees). The latter provoked the relatively mild protests that years of unintentional civilian killings have made grimly familiar. “How can you compare the dishonoring of the Holy Quran with the martyrdom of innocent civilians?” asked one prominent mullah. “The whole goal of our life is religion.” Or As NPR’s headline understated it: “For Afghans, Two Outrages, Two Different Reactions.”

And for Americans? To deploy Defense Secretary Leon Panetta himself this week was perhaps the only way to distinguish this apology from our Quran-burning reaction.  And before that there was the empathetic reaction of NATO’s Senior Civilian Representative Mark Sedwill to the García-Marquezesque community organized beheading of infidel civilians in their Mazar UN domicile last spring: “This was an act of disrespect to the Muslim faith.” No, not the inquisition-style executions, but rather the provocative burning of a $19.99 “sensitive item” in Florida. Many sensitive item outrages, one sensitive reaction.

But not all recent outrages involve the burning of a book which lists burning as one of the milder punishments awaiting non-Muslim NATO reps.  Invisible Children’s KONY2012 YouTube video urging continued US military help in capturing Joseph Kony hooked millions of outraged viewers last week.  And what seems to help make it so popular is precisely Kony’s lack of a sensitive item: “he is not fighting for any cause, but only to maintain his power,” narrates director Jason Russell.  One might quibble over where this viral morality was when, for instance, Kanan Makiya published his 1989 book “Republic of Fear,” documenting in Iraq what the late Max Van der Stoel called the greatest violation of human rights since World War II. But for causeless Kony, who unlike Saddam does not have a Quran written in his blood, perhaps the trouble can be summed up by the remix refrain of another viral Youtube video: “Dude, you have no Quran.”

                                                                                                                                 

Or as KONY2012 “culturemaker” Ben Affleck tweeted, it’s “not a political issue. It’s a human issue.” That’s in contrast to Iraq where, as Affleck once argued, the WMD lies and Afghanistan priorities should have absolved the US of the “human” cost of decades of American realpolitique (e.g., the Kurdish genocide).  “You owe us an apology,” a Kurdish student shouted at the lecture of the US Consul General to Kurdistan last fall, citing the 1975 and 1991 “betrayals,” and the coming December 2011 pullout.  Unfortunately for him, all our apology resources have been diverted to our betrayals of more sensitive items in Florida and Bagram.

Even so, when you walk through liberated, peaceful, Americans-dine-gratis Iraqi Kurdistan as I did last month, it is clear that for now, the Kanan Makiyas prevailed over the Ben Afflecks on the “human issue.” But walking past the months-old smutty remains of the Zakho Christians’ abandoned liquor stores (the aftermath of a mullah’s December jihad homily) was a stark reminder that here, as in the Baghdad slums hours away where gays are increasingly executed by order of pseudo-governmental Islamic fatwa, the West’s fear of the residual “political issue” of Islamic law remains our tragic flaw. Indeed, with a Christian teacher killed by a Muslim student in Sulaimaniyah this month, the Christians who were defiantly signing me the cross from the shadows should know that now, dudes, you have no Kanan.  

But they do have Orhan – Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, that is, whose 2004 novel Snow bravely faced down the “sensitivities and imagined insults” that poison Kurdistan’s Islamist politics, depicting persecutions of Turks who point out the most sensitive item’s inconsistencies (as well as the fascist retaliations). “I’ve always wanted this country to prosper, to modernize,” says the protagonist. “But it seemed to me that our religion was always against all this.”

When you can’t change the country, better to change the subject: that’s The New York Times take anyway. This week it ran an ad calling on Catholics to “quit” the Church while rejecting a parallel ad for Muslims, predicting possible “fallout” in Afghanistan. Of course, the prediction is well-found. Just last January novelist Salman Rushdie had to cancel an Indian literary festival trip due to Deobandi sensitivity to much less direct words written decades ago.  Having myself felt the dusty air sucked from a Kandahar City soccer pitch when I replied in the negative to a wild-eyed “you Muslim?” I can guess what Rushdie is getting at when he describes in an early novel just how the fallout falls on the non-Muslims: “the whole disjointed unreality of the times seizes the muhalla, and the screams are echoing from every window, and the schoolboys have begun to chant…he is surrounded by voices filled with blood, and the street loafers are moving towards him, men are getting off bicycles…” You know how it tends to end.

Army Regulation 600-20 states clearly that religion is “characterized by ardor and faith.” As for which religions have more ardor, leave it to a Pakistani military delegation to explain to US army privates: I recall a Culture Q&A at Basic Training culminating in a Pakistani Major providing us an actuarial summary of how the Prophet Muhammad’s miracles outnumbered those of Jesus.  Advantage Islam, in other words. Or as a University of North Carolina religious studies professor recently advised anyone confused about Afghans’ nuanced reactions to the Quran-burning fiasco, “If you really want to think of what the Quran means to Muslims, don't think of the Bible. Think of the very person of Christ.”

To be sure, when the shock and dizzying conspiracies wear off in Kandahar, the Panjway massacre will elicit plenty more outrage. But if the UNC prof’s primer left you wanting to know anything else about Islam, don’t expect to find it in the Times, literary festivals, or on any viral “human issues” video.  The next outrage – whether in Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Africa, or elsewhere – and the West’s ensuing reaction should suffice.