A reply is needed to John Syme’s article on Scott Prince, deputy chief defense counsel to detainees held by the American military. Prince’s integrity, equanimity, and nuance in confronting such daunting legal, ethical, and emotional issues are admirable. His advocacy for the rule of law in the so-called war on terror reflects a voice of restraint in the din of neo-imperial apologies. But even a rare man of conscience can slip into dangerous errors of perception, and Prince (or Syme in his summary) misleads the Journal’s readers in ways that give false comfort and false concern, if unwittingly. First, Prince calls the US justice system the “envy of the world.” But our justice system at federal, state, and local levels is corrupt, as countless popular and scholarly books attest. If “the world” envies our shattered legal system and juridical order, we have to wonder if they are aware of its unprecedented per capita rates of incarceration, its radical commodification, and its infectious classism, racism, and sexism. Researchers have shown, in this vein, that Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo are natural extensions of the brutal and licentious use of force against countless men and women whose innocence is a matter of indifference to their captors. Second, Prince reports that “an understanding of the Bible is necessary for understanding Western civilization…as a source of values.” Likewise, on the way to Iraq he felt he had “to study Islam,” not least the Qur’an. It is honorable to grasp and then publicly insist that Islam is theologically joined to Judaism and Christianity; they are, we read, all religions of the Book whose “equivalancies” suggest “areas where we can reach agreement.” But then Prince instructs us that “The civic center of gravity in our country is the courthouse. In the Muslim world, it’s the mosque. When things go wrong, we don’t pray. We sue somebody. We go to the courthouse. They go to the mosque.” Prince here is just like all those Americans who started buying the Qur’an to make sense of 9/11; admirably curious but misled. Alas, it remains common to assume that if you wish to understand horrible acts committed by Muslims, you ought to study Islam. We do not assume Judaism or Christianity explains such acts by Jews or Christians, a habit of mind that may derive from a bit of research — always guaranteed to produce the cliché that Islam uniquely fuses religion and politics. But, as scholars have tirelessly demonstrated, “religions” are bad predictors of their adherents’ activities. Religious doctrines, dogmas, teachings, or rituals do not define Muslim, Christian, or Jewish (or Buddhist, etc.) social values, ethical behavior, or political decisions; rather, concrete experiences do. The same is true of “civilization,” a concept without analytical merit. Prince is, indeed, decades behind the criticism of such grand categories as “the Muslim world” and “Western civilization,” which lack explanatory or causal power to tell us anything anywhere about politics or war or even law. It is simply false to claim that “we” go to the courthouse while Muslims go to the mosque to settle our civic disputes. “We” pray far more than go to court (as reports of American litigiousness are a conservative, tort-reform bogeyman). More to the point, Muslims have many legal and civil modes of conflict resolution outside “the mosque.” Reducing Islam or Muslims to “the mosque,” however well-intended, is a racialist red herring. It is unclear that “the Muslim world” refers to anything, much less a set of values basically different from “ours.” Prince distinguishes the “west” from “Islam” as the predicate for reconciliation; he seems to think the “west” and “Islam” are fundamentally different but also basically or sufficiently the same. So he “is anxious to look for similarities rather than differences” but declares that Muslims and “we” (“westerners”? Christians?) differ in our basic social cognition! He seeks commonality but depicts a “Muslim world” wholly identified with “the mosque” as its governing civil orientation. A reader may be forgiven for inferring that Prince is deriving the commonality from his own desire and the opposition from his experience and study. In any event, Prince reiterates the quintessential dichotomy that Edward Said attributed to “Orientalism” and that imagines an Orient wedded to religion and culture and an Occident beholden to reason and the rule of law. As Said, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other radical critics of American hegemony stressed, antagonism triumphs from the start as long as liberals and conservatives concur on “racial,” “cultural,” “civilizational,” or “religious” distinctions and differ only over the prospects of overcoming or “understanding” those distinctions. In the end Syme comes back around to the greatness of Davidson’s progressive wisdom which guided Prince to this conclusion: “We just need to understand these people. We need to tell the good guys from the bad guys.” Note the Manichean mantra, the cowboys-and-Injuns orthodoxy dragged from Wayne to Bush to Obama. We should resist this and its accomplice: the liberal tolerance of “our” legal-rational “Western civilization” for “their” religious-communal “Muslim world.” This tolerance invokes what it claims to disavow, and exacerbates conditions in a political climate dominated by American power. It is hardly “progressive” to accept, tolerate, and understand a fabricated “Muslim world” or herald a bygone American “rule of law” in order to facilitate an illegal, barbaric, and unaccountable “war on terror.” Does “Muslim world” or “Western civilization” really explain 9/11, the Holocaust, the siege of Gaza, the exploitation of Haiti, “disaster capitalism,” the destruction of Chechnya, or basically anything else in the political-economic history of military conflict? Do we learn something about Davidson’s infinitely self-celebrated enlightenment tradition that its liberal-progressive inheritors boast of “understanding the Muslim world” when no one would dare discuss without extensive justification the behavior of the “Christian” or “Jewish” world? What does it say about us that “we” at the core of the American global regime discuss the world in such antiquated, racialized, essentialist terms, specifically in the name of thoughtful reflection?
Sayres Rudy ‘86
Visiting Professor
School of Social Science
Hampshire College MA
2013 Conarroe Lecture
Dean Rusk Travel Grants Slideshow
March 2010
Letter to the Davidson Journal:
RE: Spring 2010 issue (print)
A reply is needed to John Syme’s article on Scott Prince, deputy chief defense counsel to detainees held by the American military. Prince’s integrity, equanimity, and nuance in confronting such daunting legal, ethical, and emotional issues are admirable. His advocacy for the rule of law in the so-called war on terror reflects a voice of restraint in the din of neo-imperial apologies. But even a rare man of conscience can slip into dangerous errors of perception, and Prince (or Syme in his summary) misleads the Journal’s readers in ways that give false comfort and false concern, if unwittingly. First, Prince calls the US justice system the “envy of the world.” But our justice system at federal, state, and local levels is corrupt, as countless popular and scholarly books attest. If “the world” envies our shattered legal system and juridical order, we have to wonder if they are aware of its unprecedented per capita rates of incarceration, its radical commodification, and its infectious classism, racism, and sexism. Researchers have shown, in this vein, that Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo are natural extensions of the brutal and licentious use of force against countless men and women whose innocence is a matter of indifference to their captors. Second, Prince reports that “an understanding of the Bible is necessary for understanding Western civilization…as a source of values.” Likewise, on the way to Iraq he felt he had “to study Islam,” not least the Qur’an. It is honorable to grasp and then publicly insist that Islam is theologically joined to Judaism and Christianity; they are, we read, all religions of the Book whose “equivalancies” suggest “areas where we can reach agreement.” But then Prince instructs us that “The civic center of gravity in our country is the courthouse. In the Muslim world, it’s the mosque. When things go wrong, we don’t pray. We sue somebody. We go to the courthouse. They go to the mosque.” Prince here is just like all those Americans who started buying the Qur’an to make sense of 9/11; admirably curious but misled. Alas, it remains common to assume that if you wish to understand horrible acts committed by Muslims, you ought to study Islam. We do not assume Judaism or Christianity explains such acts by Jews or Christians, a habit of mind that may derive from a bit of research — always guaranteed to produce the cliché that Islam uniquely fuses religion and politics. But, as scholars have tirelessly demonstrated, “religions” are bad predictors of their adherents’ activities. Religious doctrines, dogmas, teachings, or rituals do not define Muslim, Christian, or Jewish (or Buddhist, etc.) social values, ethical behavior, or political decisions; rather, concrete experiences do. The same is true of “civilization,” a concept without analytical merit. Prince is, indeed, decades behind the criticism of such grand categories as “the Muslim world” and “Western civilization,” which lack explanatory or causal power to tell us anything anywhere about politics or war or even law. It is simply false to claim that “we” go to the courthouse while Muslims go to the mosque to settle our civic disputes. “We” pray far more than go to court (as reports of American litigiousness are a conservative, tort-reform bogeyman). More to the point, Muslims have many legal and civil modes of conflict resolution outside “the mosque.” Reducing Islam or Muslims to “the mosque,” however well-intended, is a racialist red herring. It is unclear that “the Muslim world” refers to anything, much less a set of values basically different from “ours.” Prince distinguishes the “west” from “Islam” as the predicate for reconciliation; he seems to think the “west” and “Islam” are fundamentally different but also basically or sufficiently the same. So he “is anxious to look for similarities rather than differences” but declares that Muslims and “we” (“westerners”? Christians?) differ in our basic social cognition! He seeks commonality but depicts a “Muslim world” wholly identified with “the mosque” as its governing civil orientation. A reader may be forgiven for inferring that Prince is deriving the commonality from his own desire and the opposition from his experience and study. In any event, Prince reiterates the quintessential dichotomy that Edward Said attributed to “Orientalism” and that imagines an Orient wedded to religion and culture and an Occident beholden to reason and the rule of law. As Said, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other radical critics of American hegemony stressed, antagonism triumphs from the start as long as liberals and conservatives concur on “racial,” “cultural,” “civilizational,” or “religious” distinctions and differ only over the prospects of overcoming or “understanding” those distinctions. In the end Syme comes back around to the greatness of Davidson’s progressive wisdom which guided Prince to this conclusion: “We just need to understand these people. We need to tell the good guys from the bad guys.” Note the Manichean mantra, the cowboys-and-Injuns orthodoxy dragged from Wayne to Bush to Obama. We should resist this and its accomplice: the liberal tolerance of “our” legal-rational “Western civilization” for “their” religious-communal “Muslim world.” This tolerance invokes what it claims to disavow, and exacerbates conditions in a political climate dominated by American power. It is hardly “progressive” to accept, tolerate, and understand a fabricated “Muslim world” or herald a bygone American “rule of law” in order to facilitate an illegal, barbaric, and unaccountable “war on terror.” Does “Muslim world” or “Western civilization” really explain 9/11, the Holocaust, the siege of Gaza, the exploitation of Haiti, “disaster capitalism,” the destruction of Chechnya, or basically anything else in the political-economic history of military conflict? Do we learn something about Davidson’s infinitely self-celebrated enlightenment tradition that its liberal-progressive inheritors boast of “understanding the Muslim world” when no one would dare discuss without extensive justification the behavior of the “Christian” or “Jewish” world? What does it say about us that “we” at the core of the American global regime discuss the world in such antiquated, racialized, essentialist terms, specifically in the name of thoughtful reflection?
Sayres Rudy ‘86
Visiting Professor
School of Social Science
Hampshire College MA
Spring 2010 issue