بالروح, بالدم

[me_and_my_dozer]

Just watched the Third Jihad, a documentary with a pretty clear agenda. And I feel reassured that I can watch something and appreciate it while thoroughly disagreeing with the fundamental arc of its narrative.

Some things I found off about the movie.

1. The experts appear terribly one-sided and immoderate: aside from Bernard Lewis (!!!!), the experts are mostly authors of books with such unassuming titles as "Londonistan", + Tom Ridge. Riiiiiiight. I was waiting for Wafa Sultan or Irshad Manji to appear as cameos
2. The main character, a self-professed Muslim, does an obnoxiously bad job of defending "Regular Islam". "Extremists" in the movie repeatedly quote Qur'anic passages, cite tradition and ahadith to justify their actions whereas the protagonist... defends his personal actions without really mentioning what his personal faith entails, or what he sees as being an ordinary alternative to this Islam. For someone trying to reconcile the American population to a large portion of Muslims, he does a surprisingly poor job of defusing the perception that ALL Muslims are extremists.
3. There is an utter conflation of Islam the religion, Islam the political tool and Islam the cultural reality. Pretending that Islam as a religion has appropriated honour killings, which is more accurately a cultural reality in some places that practice Islam, feels dishonest to me. Similarly, combining the waxing of ANY Muslim group with the spread of Radical Islam is similarly dishonest to me. This is without discussing how groups supporting Hamas the political entity can not care one bit about its place within the realm of Religious Islam... and how the narrator defaming Muslim groups by citing their support of Hamas is very unnerving to me (esp. outside a discussion of why such groups are on the USA's terror list. It's like the narrator is saying that since Hamas is a Muslim group in a foreign country, they are ipso facto psychotic extremist TerrorIslamists.)

What I appreciated about it:

1. A clear(er) discussion of the breadth of "Radical Islam", i.e. the interpretation of Islam that sees total global conquest and the imposition of a blanket Sharia Law everywhere. This thing sort of scares me a bit, too. Interestingly, reading a lot more on international politics, thanks to the Economist, Slate and others, has made me fear places like Afghanistan and Pakistan more.
2. The insidious effect of what they call "cultural jihad", i.e. the use of democratic institutions, by way of democratic principles, to further an extremist agenda. Protesters holding signs that say "Behead All Those Who Insult Islamd" make me think twice about my disdain for hate propaganda exceptions applied to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Now, an interesting point brought up by the movie (and utterly fumbled, I find) was this: is the fundamental characteristic of Canada and the USA its democratic principles, or its protection of freedoms? This is an interesting one to me, though I haven't studied the issue much... Discussion of the "Demographic Problem" caused my Muslim immigrants to Western countries raises the hypothetical question of what happens if the majority of a country wanted Sharia Law?

I know that some of the founding fathers explicitly used the term "Tyranny of the Majority" (and my homie de Tocqueville thought it apt as well), which speaks to me of a fear of democracy overwhelming freedom or freedoms. But then again, freedom of expression and movement have been curtailed in situations as well (like some parts of Occupy Wall Street) when the fear was not of the abrogation of other people's freedoms. So, would a predominantly Muslim USA have the means of passing any kind of Sharia Law that fundamentally limited people's freedoms? What about a fully Muslim one? Would they have the means of tying their own metaphorical hands? But then, the Sharia Law's constraints on freedoms would only be relevant if they were tested, which would mean that somebody existed outside of this normative definition of Good Citizen / Muslim, no?

More to the point, what is the place of religion in a Western country? This question has already popped up in the US with these past elections (and many, many others before it, including the ever-famous "Pope controlling JFK" imbroglio) and I'm not sure how to deal with it. I don't think I'm being very coherent here, so will need to explore later.