Fighting Fitna

In the interests of balance, since I gave so much space to Fitna the other week, here's a response (or rather a parody) by Saudi Raeed al-Saeed. He says, at the end, that it's crap, but that it only took him a few hours; whereas Geert Wilders took several months and his film is crap too.



This effort, Schism, is one of many responses to Fitna available on YouTube, but probably the best of the bunch (there's also a tedious American preacher and a hijab-wearing teenager explaining in Arabic how much she admires the Virgin Mary). Disgracefully, it was taken down for a while because of its "offensive" content, but then put up again after protests. To produce ripostes like this is, surely, the only correct way for his critics to answer Wilders. That so many Muslims have taken the trouble to produce their own films rather than rioting on the streets is probably the best thing to have come out of the whole Fitna debacle.

Saeed's technique owes much to Wilders, taking out-of-context Biblical quotations, mainly from the New Testament, and splicing them together with footage of atrocities and other examples of "Christian" belligerence. The Srebrenica massacre, for example, British soldiers beating up Iraqi civilians and American army recruits. There are also shots of Orangemen, crucifixion re-enactments in the Philippines and the flaming crosses of the Ku Klux Klan. And even the Jonestown mass-suicide. The whole thing ends, somewhat bizarrely, with a rendition of God Save the Queen. Why not Onward Christian Soldiers?

Saeed's point, of course, is that you can use any sacred texts to justify atrocities. That was scarcely Wilders' point, though. The main intention of Fitna seems to have been scaremongering about immigration. Apart from that, he was rather obviously pointing out that Koranic verses which may seem to justify terrorism are, in fact, used by the terrorists themselves to justify what they are doing. This does not, at any rate, seem to be the case with any of the clips Saeed has discovered. If they had had film cameras in the twelfth century then there would doubtless be plenty of carefully-preserved footage of the Crusades he could have used. Today, however, the only people who take to heart the more violent passages from the Bible are looking for ammunition to discredit it.

It is plainly and rather boringly true that there are violent and gruesome passages in the Bible, which you don't even need to take out of context to find both disturbing and potentially dangerous. But such passages are scarcely used, these days, as inspirational material. In Anglican evensong the psalms are even censored: psalm 137, for example ("By the rivers of Babylon") usually loses the line which goes "Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones". Christian apologists can seem over-eager to explain away, rather than simply condemn, violent passages in the Bible, but there are none I am aware of actually invoking such passages in order to encourage their followers to commit violent actions. The use of Old Testament passages to justify Israeli settlement of the West Bank is another matter entirely.

There are two strands here which easily (and by design) become entangled. The first is the problem of religion and violence in general. Religion is not "about" violence in the sense that it is "about" prayer, or right conduct, or developing and accounting for a sense of the sacred. But it does tend to produce a type of group solidarity which has often in history issued forth in violence. Religion is a corporate activity. Solitary ascetics aside, one of its main functions (reflected in the very word) is to bind people together, and the main means by which this is achieved is to invest emotional interest in an imaginary external object (a.k.a. "God") which then becomes a shared reference-point for the community of believers. Defending that object naturally comes to be seen as an imperative. While the founders of religions, in general, have preached peace and tolerance no religion has ever achieved political power without making its compromise with war and coercion. Not even Buddhism.

What makes Islam particularly problematic, on the other hand, is rooted not in the general tendency of religions but in its own unique history. Mohammed fought battles. He ordered the mass-killing of the Jews of Medina. His sword - or a sword purporting to be his - is exhibited in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. Doubtless he also preached tolerance. But he was a complex personality, and there are deeds of darkness in his biography, some of which found their way into the verses of the Koran. And any objective account of his life will admit that, as time went on and his power in Arabia grew the darker, less tolerant aspects of his personality began to emerge. It took centuries for Christians to make the transition from turning the other cheek to fighting battles for the faith. In Islam the process took place within the lifetime of the prophet.



This matters, not because it makes Islam inherently a violent religion (that is not inevitable) but because of the unthinking respect and reverence that Muslims are called upon to feel for their founder. This inhibits criticism: his actions, however questionable to modern tastes, can only ever be explained and justified, never simply condemned. And because his is supposed to be a model for human life, anything that he did, whether engaging in holy wars or marrying a nine-year-old girl, becomes sanctified. Moreover, however wrong-headed they may appear in the eyes of the majority of Muslim believers, advocates of terrorist violence can with plausibility look to the example of Mohammed, and quote the Koran, whereas Christians who engage in violent conduct are well aware that Jesus did not behave like that.

In his riposte to Fitna, Raeed al Saeed quotes Matthew 10:34. "I did not come to bring peace, but a sword". As prophecies go, this must count as one of the more accurate ones: down the centuries Christians have fought enthusiastically and bloodily against each other and against followers of other creeds. And all in the name of a teacher who claimed that the meek would inherit the earth and urged his disciples to "love your enemies and do good to them that hate you". Saeed had no trouble finding material for his film. And the Bible has been used, and continues to be used, to justify such things as slavery, the persecution of gay people, the subordination of women and, yes, warfare. It can also, like any holy book, serve as a convenient substitute for thought. But it's just a book. Militant Islam, by contrast, is a movement.

As many have noticed, Fitna apes the form and production-values of a jihadist video. The combination of extreme piety and murderous violence that is the hallmark of such productions is, at present, a phenomenon unique to radical Islam. That the Koran can be made to promote violence is in itself irrelevant. That it is, in fact, being used in this way is something that matters a great deal.