Inactive Theory & Practice
Irfan Khawaja is Instructor of Philosophy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Carrie-Ann Biondi is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and of Humanities & Justice Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The views they express here are their own.
I had originally wanted my first blog entry to be on the Jalianwala Bagh Massacre of April 13, 1919, but I couldn't resist posting this little item after seeing it in the April 8 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education. I think my exasperation is showing. I tire of the journalistic game whereby we all pretend that"reformist" hairsplitting over the niceties of shariah can somehow take the place of a wholesale critique and rejection of political Islam. Mention Catholic"natural law" doctrine in an American political context, and you'll hear screams of protest (remember the Clarence Thomas hearings, way back when?). Why the double standard? And how long must we put up with it?
The Role of Islamic Law
To the Editor:
In "Who Owns Islamic Law?" (The Chronicle, February 25), David Glenn writes: "For outsiders, it is tempting to caricature this debate as a contest between Taliban-style radicals and Western-style liberals. ... But the terrain is actually far more complex than that. There are dozens of strains of traditionalist and liberal thought in the Muslim world, each looking toward different conceptions of Shariah and drawing on different elements of Islamic history and jurisprudence."
Entirely missing from this account is the point that many insiders in the so-called "Muslim world" regard Islamic law as a pointless, archaic, and oppressive irrelevance. From this perspective, the debate between competing schools of Islamic jurisprudence is a disingenuous exercise that evades fundamental issues. Why, exactly, are we obliged to take orders from a coercive ultimatum giver in the heavens? And why are we obliged to take seriously those who insist that we must do so?
Neither question comes up in Mr. Glenn's article, even by implication. The assumption is simply that Muslims must be governed by some variant of Islamic law; the question is which one. In compliance with this axiom, Mr. Glenn's interlocutors reserve criticism not for their preposterous metaphysical constructions, but for secularism: The "difficulty," we are airily told, is that "secularism" has been "thoroughly discredited in the Muslim world." A curious claim. ...
The question is not "who owns Islamic law?" The question is whether Islamic law owns us. ...
Irfan Khawaja
Adjunct Professor of Philosophy
College of New Jersey
Ewing, N.J.
Executive Director
Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society
New York
www.secularislam.org
One of the things that annoyed me the most about Glenn's article was the cavalier claim that"secularism" had been discredited in the"Muslim world." Here is a double-standard nested within a double-standard: apparently it's perfectly legitimate to say that"secularism" as such has failed in the Muslim world, but never legitimate to say that"Islam" as such has failed there. Indeed, it's not even legitimate to invoke Islam as such in an explanation of anything problematic that happens there.
Quiz question: To whom do we owe the honor of this particular fallacy? Answer: Edward Said. Explanation to follow.
The Role of Islamic Law
To the Editor:
In "Who Owns Islamic Law?" (The Chronicle, February 25), David Glenn writes: "For outsiders, it is tempting to caricature this debate as a contest between Taliban-style radicals and Western-style liberals. ... But the terrain is actually far more complex than that. There are dozens of strains of traditionalist and liberal thought in the Muslim world, each looking toward different conceptions of Shariah and drawing on different elements of Islamic history and jurisprudence."
Entirely missing from this account is the point that many insiders in the so-called "Muslim world" regard Islamic law as a pointless, archaic, and oppressive irrelevance. From this perspective, the debate between competing schools of Islamic jurisprudence is a disingenuous exercise that evades fundamental issues. Why, exactly, are we obliged to take orders from a coercive ultimatum giver in the heavens? And why are we obliged to take seriously those who insist that we must do so?
Neither question comes up in Mr. Glenn's article, even by implication. The assumption is simply that Muslims must be governed by some variant of Islamic law; the question is which one. In compliance with this axiom, Mr. Glenn's interlocutors reserve criticism not for their preposterous metaphysical constructions, but for secularism: The "difficulty," we are airily told, is that "secularism" has been "thoroughly discredited in the Muslim world." A curious claim. ...
The question is not "who owns Islamic law?" The question is whether Islamic law owns us. ...
Irfan Khawaja
Adjunct Professor of Philosophy
College of New Jersey
Ewing, N.J.
Executive Director
Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society
New York
www.secularislam.org
One of the things that annoyed me the most about Glenn's article was the cavalier claim that"secularism" had been discredited in the"Muslim world." Here is a double-standard nested within a double-standard: apparently it's perfectly legitimate to say that"secularism" as such has failed in the Muslim world, but never legitimate to say that"Islam" as such has failed there. Indeed, it's not even legitimate to invoke Islam as such in an explanation of anything problematic that happens there.
Quiz question: To whom do we owe the honor of this particular fallacy? Answer: Edward Said. Explanation to follow.
As it happens, I've started this blog on April 13, 2005--the 86th anniversary of the Jalianwala Bagh Massacre of 1919. I suppose in one respect the anniversary of a massacre is not exactly a propitious beginning for anything, but in another, it's the perfect beginning for this blog. The historiography of the ten minutes between the first and last shots at Jalianwala is as good an illustration of the point of this blog as any I could have devised in a set-piece introduction.
To those who know what it is, the "Jalianwala Bagh Massacre" needs no further description or introduction: it wears its significance on its sleeve. Those who don't know what it is pose the more interesting problem. How to explain it to them? It shouldn't be that hard. But it is.
At a bare, brute minimum, we might describe it this way: The end of the first World War saw the rise of nationalism in India, and with it, the first attempts of the British Raj to squelch that nationalism. Notable among these were the Rowlatt Acts, designed to suppress sedition and subversion. "The struggle against the Rowlatt Acts was the first major contest" between the British Raj and the Indian National Congress, writes Lawrence James in "The Rise and Fall of the British Empire."
On April 6, 1919, Gandhi had called for a hartal, or nationwide act of protest against the Acts. Defying a ban on outdoor public meetings, a crowd gathered at Jalianwala Bagh (a park) in the largely Sikh neighborhood of the city of Amritsar, in the eastern Punjab province of India. A detachment of British soldiers led by Brigadier General Reginald Dyer marched into the park, and without provocation fired on the crowd, killing 379 and wounding about a thousand. The massacre marked the turning point in the nationalist struggle against the Raj in something like the way that the Boston Massacre (March 5, 1770) did in the American case or the Sharpesville Massacre (March 21, 1960) in the South African.
It all seems clear, objective and obvious enough. But as my Wallace Stevens-inspired title indicates, it isn't. A bit of reflection should indicate that the neutral-sounding story I've just told can at every point be contested and modified so as to tell a very different story with completely different ramifications.
That's the problematic--or at least one of the problematics--that inspires this blog. Theory interacts with practice. Descriptions interact with evaluations. Facts interact with values. What happens to objectivity when they do? My working hypothesis is that neither philosophers nor historians really have a good handle on these questions. But you can do neither philosophy nor history without answers to them. Hence the need for dialogue.
More on Jalianwala Bagh--and those larger questions--in a subsequent entry.
To those who know what it is, the "Jalianwala Bagh Massacre" needs no further description or introduction: it wears its significance on its sleeve. Those who don't know what it is pose the more interesting problem. How to explain it to them? It shouldn't be that hard. But it is.
At a bare, brute minimum, we might describe it this way: The end of the first World War saw the rise of nationalism in India, and with it, the first attempts of the British Raj to squelch that nationalism. Notable among these were the Rowlatt Acts, designed to suppress sedition and subversion. "The struggle against the Rowlatt Acts was the first major contest" between the British Raj and the Indian National Congress, writes Lawrence James in "The Rise and Fall of the British Empire."
On April 6, 1919, Gandhi had called for a hartal, or nationwide act of protest against the Acts. Defying a ban on outdoor public meetings, a crowd gathered at Jalianwala Bagh (a park) in the largely Sikh neighborhood of the city of Amritsar, in the eastern Punjab province of India. A detachment of British soldiers led by Brigadier General Reginald Dyer marched into the park, and without provocation fired on the crowd, killing 379 and wounding about a thousand. The massacre marked the turning point in the nationalist struggle against the Raj in something like the way that the Boston Massacre (March 5, 1770) did in the American case or the Sharpesville Massacre (March 21, 1960) in the South African.
It all seems clear, objective and obvious enough. But as my Wallace Stevens-inspired title indicates, it isn't. A bit of reflection should indicate that the neutral-sounding story I've just told can at every point be contested and modified so as to tell a very different story with completely different ramifications.
That's the problematic--or at least one of the problematics--that inspires this blog. Theory interacts with practice. Descriptions interact with evaluations. Facts interact with values. What happens to objectivity when they do? My working hypothesis is that neither philosophers nor historians really have a good handle on these questions. But you can do neither philosophy nor history without answers to them. Hence the need for dialogue.
More on Jalianwala Bagh--and those larger questions--in a subsequent entry.
I was content for a while to watch the David Horowitz "Students for Academic Freedom" (SAF) juggernaut with a certain equanimity. While I personally don't consider myself a "conservative" or "on the Right," I've often been described that way by people who don't like my views, and in certain cases, I suppose the shoe fits.
Given this, I'm perfectly willing to admit that there is at least a grain of truth in Horowitz's complaints. The academy is indeed skewed to the left, and by "skewed" I mean irrationally biased in that direction. One example of this--among dozens--is the almost complete inability of left-leaning academics to face the fact that inappropriate proselytization does take place in the classroom, i.e., that students are in subtle ways intimidated into toeing an essentially left-leaning party line on any number of issues. There is also a diversity problem in the curriculum; students are simply not introduced in a fair way to the broad spectrum of views that lie to the right of" center".
I was content to watch the juggernaut, I was saying, until SAF actually showed up on my campus, The College of New Jersey. Now I honestly wish they'd go away.
One of my complaints against SAF is perhaps idiosyncratic to me: I've had unwanted personal dealings with Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine, and I don't regard either Horowitz or his organization as honorable or trustworthy.
In December 2002, Jamie Glazov, the Managing Editor of FrontPage, filched an article of mine from the website of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society, and published it in FrontPage. I took offense at the failure to get permission prior to publication, and demanded that it be taken down. It eventually was, with the promise (from Glazov) that he would ask permission before printing another article of mine--permission that I had no intention of ever granting.
A few months later I happened to go back to the FrontPage site, and lo, there was another article of mine there, once again printed without my permission. This time, I didn't really feel like going through the effort of re-contacting Glazov to insist that he take the article down. I just decided to hold it against Horowitz & Co. until such an occasion as I could use it against them. Which occasion is now.
It may seem a trivial incident, but ask yourself whether it adds to or detracts from Horowitz's general credibility as a public figure. Would you trust a person whose organization conducted itself in this way? And it's far from the only example of its kind.
A second complaint against SAF: even if we concede that academia has to be reformed, and has its left-leaning biases, SAF's specifically legislative agenda is too blunt and populist an instrument by which to effect it. Legislators who have never spent a minute in the classroom have no business legislating what goes on in them. The putative cure is worse than the disease.
But the deepest criticism of the organization is that its mandate is simply self-contradictory. Consider two passages from SAF's "Student Bill of Rights." This passage is from section I:
"The central purposes of a University are the pursuit of truth, the discovery of new knowledge through scholarship and research, the study and reasoned criticism of intellectual and cultural traditions, the teaching and general development of students to help them become creative individuals and productive citizens of a pluralistic democracy, and the transmission of knowledge and learning to a society at large."
No argument there. Note the claim that truth is the object of inquiry, and that inquiry leads to knowledge. Now here is a passage from section II:
"Curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences should reflect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge in these areas by providing students with dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate."
The passage from section I tells us that the purpose of the university is the pursuit of truth. It then tells us that scholarship and research achieve knowledge--which implies that scholars and researchers are in possession of some truths.
The passage from section II then insists that the same scholars contradict this fact in the classroom by pretending that "all human knowledge" is uncertain. Well, no it isn't, and the document itself says it isn't. If we have some knowledge (and we do), not all knowledge is uncertain. Given that, our knowledge should guide how we construct curricula. It should reflect both the certainties and the uncertainties we can claim to have, AND guide how we think about the overall"development" of our students. But the judgment on the ultimate balance on these subjects should be in the hands of academics--no one else.
This might all seem like philosophical hairsplitting. It isn't. The question raised here is an important epistemological issue that bears in a powerful way on pedagogical practice. Should university curricula reflect an all-round skepticism about human knowledge? Or should they be based on what instructors can claim to demonstrate and know? SAF is explicitly affirming the former. They're wrong, and the error sits at the heart of their quixotic enterprise.
Well, here is their website, because I wouldn't want to give you just MY half of the story:
http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/
Given this, I'm perfectly willing to admit that there is at least a grain of truth in Horowitz's complaints. The academy is indeed skewed to the left, and by "skewed" I mean irrationally biased in that direction. One example of this--among dozens--is the almost complete inability of left-leaning academics to face the fact that inappropriate proselytization does take place in the classroom, i.e., that students are in subtle ways intimidated into toeing an essentially left-leaning party line on any number of issues. There is also a diversity problem in the curriculum; students are simply not introduced in a fair way to the broad spectrum of views that lie to the right of" center".
I was content to watch the juggernaut, I was saying, until SAF actually showed up on my campus, The College of New Jersey. Now I honestly wish they'd go away.
One of my complaints against SAF is perhaps idiosyncratic to me: I've had unwanted personal dealings with Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine, and I don't regard either Horowitz or his organization as honorable or trustworthy.
In December 2002, Jamie Glazov, the Managing Editor of FrontPage, filched an article of mine from the website of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society, and published it in FrontPage. I took offense at the failure to get permission prior to publication, and demanded that it be taken down. It eventually was, with the promise (from Glazov) that he would ask permission before printing another article of mine--permission that I had no intention of ever granting.
A few months later I happened to go back to the FrontPage site, and lo, there was another article of mine there, once again printed without my permission. This time, I didn't really feel like going through the effort of re-contacting Glazov to insist that he take the article down. I just decided to hold it against Horowitz & Co. until such an occasion as I could use it against them. Which occasion is now.
It may seem a trivial incident, but ask yourself whether it adds to or detracts from Horowitz's general credibility as a public figure. Would you trust a person whose organization conducted itself in this way? And it's far from the only example of its kind.
A second complaint against SAF: even if we concede that academia has to be reformed, and has its left-leaning biases, SAF's specifically legislative agenda is too blunt and populist an instrument by which to effect it. Legislators who have never spent a minute in the classroom have no business legislating what goes on in them. The putative cure is worse than the disease.
But the deepest criticism of the organization is that its mandate is simply self-contradictory. Consider two passages from SAF's "Student Bill of Rights." This passage is from section I:
"The central purposes of a University are the pursuit of truth, the discovery of new knowledge through scholarship and research, the study and reasoned criticism of intellectual and cultural traditions, the teaching and general development of students to help them become creative individuals and productive citizens of a pluralistic democracy, and the transmission of knowledge and learning to a society at large."
No argument there. Note the claim that truth is the object of inquiry, and that inquiry leads to knowledge. Now here is a passage from section II:
"Curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences should reflect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge in these areas by providing students with dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate."
The passage from section I tells us that the purpose of the university is the pursuit of truth. It then tells us that scholarship and research achieve knowledge--which implies that scholars and researchers are in possession of some truths.
The passage from section II then insists that the same scholars contradict this fact in the classroom by pretending that "all human knowledge" is uncertain. Well, no it isn't, and the document itself says it isn't. If we have some knowledge (and we do), not all knowledge is uncertain. Given that, our knowledge should guide how we construct curricula. It should reflect both the certainties and the uncertainties we can claim to have, AND guide how we think about the overall"development" of our students. But the judgment on the ultimate balance on these subjects should be in the hands of academics--no one else.
This might all seem like philosophical hairsplitting. It isn't. The question raised here is an important epistemological issue that bears in a powerful way on pedagogical practice. Should university curricula reflect an all-round skepticism about human knowledge? Or should they be based on what instructors can claim to demonstrate and know? SAF is explicitly affirming the former. They're wrong, and the error sits at the heart of their quixotic enterprise.
Well, here is their website, because I wouldn't want to give you just MY half of the story:
http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/
Consider the belief-set of a great many American liberals on the subject of testimonial evidence, as suggested by the Op-Ed and letters columns of The New York Times this past week:
1. When students complain about being intimidated by professors in the classroom, their complaints can be dismissed as spurious (cf. recent travails at Columbia University).
2. When bureaucrats complain about being intimidated by their supervisors in the bureaucracy, their complaints are to be treated as having probative value, at least when their testimony undermines policies of the Bush Administration (cf. Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson IV, and most recently Carl Ford Jr. on the nomination of John Bolton).
Coherent or incoherent? Principled or opportunist? I think I’ll ape Fox News today. I report; you decide.
Now take the conjunction of beliefs (1) and (2), and consider the person who believes both while taking him- or herself to be in a position to judge the CIA’s capacity to process the testimony of defectors such as “Curveball” or Ahmad Chalabi. “The CIA was too credulous in judging their testimony,” we’re told—by people who credulously believe anything that comes out of the mouths of defectors like Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson, and Carl Ford.
Credible or disingenuous? Rational or unreasonable? I report; you decide.
It gets better, however. Consider Nicholas Kristof’s whine-soaked column of April 12 in the Times, “A Slap in the Face”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/opinion/12kristof.html
Here we learn the astounding news that the public distrusts the press. Considering that the average American newspaper editor is committed to all of the incoherences I’ve just described, this should come as no surprise to anyone—except someone in the newspaper business.
After that crack piece of reporting, we learn from Kristof that the public’s distrust of the press is the causal factor behind…censorship! Kristof: “A recent report from the Pew Research Center, ‘Trends 2005,’ is painful to read. The report says that 45 percent of Americans believe little or nothing in their daily newspapers, up from 16 percent two decades ago…. In this kind of environment, it's not surprising that journalists are headed for jail.”
Right. So to distrust is to coerce. There's an axiom they never taught us in graduate school... If only we’d trust the press more blindly, freedom would be secure. Fideism as freedom....
What censorship, by the way? According to Kristof, it consists in the fact that two journalists (Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper) who are refusing the reveal their sources in a criminal investigation may go to jail for obstruction of justice.
Never mind that this issue bears no relation whatsoever to distrust of the press. Never mind that it was liberals who called most loudly for the investigation. What I like is the double standard. When Martha Stewart obstructs justice, people cheer as she's packed off to prison; when journalists obstruct justice, they take the moral high ground and hide behind the First Amendment.
Granted the First Amendment doesn’t grant a right to obstruct justice, but if you’ve resolved to trample on coherence, why not go as far as that? Oh wait, I’m not just reporting any more, am I?
1. When students complain about being intimidated by professors in the classroom, their complaints can be dismissed as spurious (cf. recent travails at Columbia University).
2. When bureaucrats complain about being intimidated by their supervisors in the bureaucracy, their complaints are to be treated as having probative value, at least when their testimony undermines policies of the Bush Administration (cf. Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson IV, and most recently Carl Ford Jr. on the nomination of John Bolton).
Coherent or incoherent? Principled or opportunist? I think I’ll ape Fox News today. I report; you decide.
Now take the conjunction of beliefs (1) and (2), and consider the person who believes both while taking him- or herself to be in a position to judge the CIA’s capacity to process the testimony of defectors such as “Curveball” or Ahmad Chalabi. “The CIA was too credulous in judging their testimony,” we’re told—by people who credulously believe anything that comes out of the mouths of defectors like Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson, and Carl Ford.
Credible or disingenuous? Rational or unreasonable? I report; you decide.
It gets better, however. Consider Nicholas Kristof’s whine-soaked column of April 12 in the Times, “A Slap in the Face”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/opinion/12kristof.html
Here we learn the astounding news that the public distrusts the press. Considering that the average American newspaper editor is committed to all of the incoherences I’ve just described, this should come as no surprise to anyone—except someone in the newspaper business.
After that crack piece of reporting, we learn from Kristof that the public’s distrust of the press is the causal factor behind…censorship! Kristof: “A recent report from the Pew Research Center, ‘Trends 2005,’ is painful to read. The report says that 45 percent of Americans believe little or nothing in their daily newspapers, up from 16 percent two decades ago…. In this kind of environment, it's not surprising that journalists are headed for jail.”
Right. So to distrust is to coerce. There's an axiom they never taught us in graduate school... If only we’d trust the press more blindly, freedom would be secure. Fideism as freedom....
What censorship, by the way? According to Kristof, it consists in the fact that two journalists (Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper) who are refusing the reveal their sources in a criminal investigation may go to jail for obstruction of justice.
Never mind that this issue bears no relation whatsoever to distrust of the press. Never mind that it was liberals who called most loudly for the investigation. What I like is the double standard. When Martha Stewart obstructs justice, people cheer as she's packed off to prison; when journalists obstruct justice, they take the moral high ground and hide behind the First Amendment.
Granted the First Amendment doesn’t grant a right to obstruct justice, but if you’ve resolved to trample on coherence, why not go as far as that? Oh wait, I’m not just reporting any more, am I?
This is the latest "obituary" of Christopher Hitchens making the rounds among the cognoscendi-- "Farewell, Hitch," by George Scialabba:
http://www.nplusonemag.com/hitch.html
Naturally, it's the sort of thing being blogged on in-the-know academic blogs. Favorable reference to it shows that you are "part of the club," assuming that that's a matter of concern for you.
Scialabba's mode of argument--if you can call it that--reduces to four transparent manuevers:
1. Drop names, and mention a long series of political causes, to show your familiarity with them and establish your credentials as a morally-engaged intellectual. Readers who haven't read all those authors will be intimidated into thinking that you know more than they do, and thereby be deluded into thinking you have a point. Other readers will simply take your statement of political sympathies as by itself a proof of your moral virtue, and a prima facie demonstration that any moral judgment you make is bound to be true.
2. Make large, bold claims without supporting any of them, on the axiom "the larger the claim, the less the need for support." This move will invariably get some semblance of "support" from manuever (1).
3. Do nothing but record your random, subjective impressions throughout the piece, but give those impressions the form of a searing polemical attack. Admit, at intervals, that nothing you've written rises above the level of stream-of-consciousness rambling. But insist on delivering your message as though it had the force of a law of nature. If you face a fundamental issue, beg the question and move on.
4. Substitute the fallacy of poisoning the well for the practice of moral judgment; then act as though there was no distinction to be drawn between them.
In a way, the fundamental manuever--and the fundamental default on the effort of argument--is (3). Scialabba's piece is not about Hitchens. It's about Scialabba. Come to think of it, the more this realization hits home, the less incentive I have to continue writing on this subject.
http://www.nplusonemag.com/hitch.html
Naturally, it's the sort of thing being blogged on in-the-know academic blogs. Favorable reference to it shows that you are "part of the club," assuming that that's a matter of concern for you.
Scialabba's mode of argument--if you can call it that--reduces to four transparent manuevers:
1. Drop names, and mention a long series of political causes, to show your familiarity with them and establish your credentials as a morally-engaged intellectual. Readers who haven't read all those authors will be intimidated into thinking that you know more than they do, and thereby be deluded into thinking you have a point. Other readers will simply take your statement of political sympathies as by itself a proof of your moral virtue, and a prima facie demonstration that any moral judgment you make is bound to be true.
2. Make large, bold claims without supporting any of them, on the axiom "the larger the claim, the less the need for support." This move will invariably get some semblance of "support" from manuever (1).
3. Do nothing but record your random, subjective impressions throughout the piece, but give those impressions the form of a searing polemical attack. Admit, at intervals, that nothing you've written rises above the level of stream-of-consciousness rambling. But insist on delivering your message as though it had the force of a law of nature. If you face a fundamental issue, beg the question and move on.
4. Substitute the fallacy of poisoning the well for the practice of moral judgment; then act as though there was no distinction to be drawn between them.
In a way, the fundamental manuever--and the fundamental default on the effort of argument--is (3). Scialabba's piece is not about Hitchens. It's about Scialabba. Come to think of it, the more this realization hits home, the less incentive I have to continue writing on this subject.
