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Fantasist and Fanaticist Renegades

Nicholas M. Guariglia - 7/27/2007

A video has recently hit the Internet, where two Iraqi men, presumably Shi’a, are hauled away by members of Muqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army. The two men sat blindfolded, their captor’s spit periodically hitting their cheek. Their accused crime was the selling of alcohol, banned under Islam. The one man asks of his subjugator, “We were saved from tyranny! And you brought another?” He then turns to his prison mate, “How can it be, brother… When Saddam fell I rejoiced, but now again I’m blindfolded.”

While watching this, I could not help but feel a sentiment of solidarity with the world’s liquor distributing and consuming Muslims, fellow lovers of a vodka and tonic. It also reaffirmed scorn for the very unimpressive statecraft of the Coalition Provisional Authority, now condemned by Dick Cheney himself; an entity which allowed, in the postwar interregnum, Iranian-backed warlords a chance to bully and claim power-vacuums in unlucky Iraqi villages. The whole episode reminded me of an article I had the misfortunate of reading, written by one Dr. M. Amir Ali, entitled The Dream of Anti-Islam Forces.

The premise behind this doctor’s editorial lay in the theory that it is the West, the liberal world, which is imposing itself –– through racist economic assimilation and chauvinist political liberalization –– on the Islamic world. This as Mr. Bush enshrines in law the prohibition of insult against captive Muslim militants during interrogation. American citizens, at last check, were allowed to speak their mind authoritatively and condemningly of any belief-system, religious or not; yet military interrogators, whose trade hinges on interpersonal exchange and psychological intimidation, are disallowed from exuding scorn onto their jihadist prisoners. (Apparently the only Americans legally barred from free expression are those whose job demands it for our national security, and the only Muslims legally exempt from potential mockery are captured al Qaidists.)

You have heard this contagion, have you not? That it is the forces of secularism which threaten and are an affront to the religious sensitivities of Muslims. Nonsense. In blaming the supposed ills of globalization or the unfairness of free trade, Dr. Ali ends up channeling the late al Qaida author Yussef al Ayyeri, who worried that gaining capital and possible economic success may make his coreligionists “love this world (and) forget the next world,” thus “reluctant to die in martyrdom.” Regression meets backwardness.

Let’s call it The Brown Man’s Burden: the enforcement of a puritanical creed –– both fantasist and fanaticist in nature –– on an entire societal structure. For dogmatists who boast their’s is a goal to achieve the hereafter, they seem fairly concerned about the here and now, do they not? How do we explain such hypocrisy and arrogance? Philosopher Lee Harris asserts there is an ever-present “fantasy ideology” within the minds of absolutists: “It is a common human weakness to wish to make more of our contribution to the world than the world is prepared to acknowledge,” Harris writes, “(and) it is our fantasy world that allows us to fill this gap.”

For the commonsensical, this fantasy world stays relatively concealed, sometimes revealing itself as simple obnoxiousness: “The man who bores us with stories designed to impress us with his importance or his intellect or his bank account,” Harris contends, “cares nothing for us as individuals, for he has already cast us in the role that he wishes us to play: we are there to be impressed by him.” Yet for the emotionally unstable, clinically insane, and inherently deviant this fantasy exposes itself proudly, often in brutal acts of sadism. We are byproducts of their fantasy. When an unhinged Ahmadinejad claims his speeches are drenched with divine intervention, rendering all listeners incapable of moving and blinking, this arouses laughter amongst the sane and sober. But he means it. And with a man like that, this is dangerous.

Imposition on the Islamic world is a complaint which we should no longer tolerate or sympathize with. The Western world, as it has come to be defined, is the most introspective, self-doubting, and second-guessing civilization there has ever been. Pensiveness, self-contemplation, self-reflection, personal deliberation, are all values derived from, or at least perfected during, the Enlightenment; the ability and eagerness to innovate and partake in adaptation and adjustment. This is the heart of our ethics, our human reason, or rationalism. We are not sure if we are right; we are almost never collectively sure if what we are doing, as a society, is correct. The very fact that self-audit and self-critique is expected and encouraged underscores this argument, even if, ironically, the critique is that we are not as self-critical as we ought to be!

To the contrary, it is the Islamists, the theocrats, who make very large and substantial claims for themselves. Their delusional fantasy has them convinced they not only know the direct manifestation of the divinity, but they also claim to know the precise will and wish of this deity, down to the utmost minuscule detail. They know God does not want you eating ham, for example. God does not want you drinking a glass of wine with your dinner. He does not want you wearing a skirt or tank-top in Gaza. He does not want you buying a DVD in Kabul. He does not want you purchasing a Barbie doll in Tehran. He does not want you driving, or text messaging, or holding hands in Saudi Arabia. God does not want you watching a World Cup match in Somalia. He does not want you reading a particular author, or drawing a particular cartoon, or watching a certain documentary, or attending a specific opera in Europe.

This is not statesmanship. This is clerical fascism: old, disgusting, illiterate, celibate clergymen who insist they are here on this planet to implement the deed of the divine, to enforce God’s unalterable and absolute law, to overseeing the population’s unquestioning submission and subservience to an all-knowing, cruel celestial punisher. A “holy man” like Ayatollah Khomeini (President Carter’s words, not mine) may experience some pretty specific revelations, maintaining an adult male “can have sexual pleasure from a child as young as a baby,” although “he should not penetrate.” A man “can have sex with animals,” however, after killing the animal, he “should not sell the meat to the people in his own village… the next door village should be fine.”

It is to this crude ridiculousness which we are implored to surrender all reason, all appeals of morality, all ethical standards, all freedom of thought and conscience, to an omnipresent supernatural authority, which watches our every moment, knows our minds, and will, if we felt so inclined to oppose this heavenly domination, sentence us to a perpetuity of misery and pain. Not only do God’s Islamist messengers make these claims, but they warn they have the inherent religious right and solemn theological duty to kill any and all who resist.

That is the imposition.