Last night I watched Homeland on my laptop, streamed in by Amazon for $1.99. It is an unconvincing potboiler implausible on too many levels to count. Last night’s storyline bent over every which way from Sunday to insure Islam’s place among the smiling aspects of life.
“And they call us terrorists,” mourns the terrorist chief whose adorable young son was just killed by a drone attack. Scriptwriters huff and puff to insure we sympathize with this grave, mild-seeming incendiary. The local (somewhere in Fairfax County VA) imam is Mother Teresa in a kufi and caftan. A lady operative chides her CIA colleague for keeping his shoes on—at a murder scene!—in a mosque. A wanted terrorist must be found, not to save American lives but to keep Americans from shooting up the Muslim community. Mosques will burn unless the plot is foiled.
No impolite misgivings allowed. It is all so self-admiring in its refusal to decide which side it is on. On those grounds alone, the show’s popularity worries me.
This is an art blog, I know. So shouldn’t we just stick to art, the stuff piling up in museums and hawked at art fairs? It is tempting, and safer, to keep the focus narrow. But art is made and viewed within a larger cultural context. That context supplies—or denies—value not only to artists and schools of art, but also to particular ideological approaches. These include images and symbols circulating outside gallery culture. Our experience of art is contingent on our grasp of larger realities. One of these is history. And history, as philosopher Jacques Ellul was fond of reminding us, is not an inoffensive discipline.
Armenians slaughtered by Turks in Aleppo, 1919
Last night’s Homeland episode dramatized the principle dear to pundit hearts: Muslims are entitled to “the benefit of the doubt.” But which Muslims, please? Ones you know personally? Ones who provide you with an objective reason, based in lived reality, for extending trust toward them as individuals? Or are they simply that disembodied, romanticized abstraction, Muslims-in-General? It is precisely the benefit of the doubt, granted blindly toward Muslims-in-General, that set the stage for the Fort Hood massacre.
Christian civilians massacred in Doékoué, Ivory Coast, by Quattara’s Muslim forces, April 2011.
Militant Islam is at war with its neighbors all across the globe. It is one thing to grant credence to the good will of your own Muslim neighbor, whom you meet, greet and speak with. You have some grasp of whether that person chooses to integrate or wishes to remake America in Islam’s image of the universal caliphate. You know what this individual thinks of honor killings, wife beating and the execution of homosexuals. You know his attitude toward Jews and Israel’s right to survival. You are able to ask if your neighbor believes Muslims can serve in the U.S. military or if, like Private First Class Nasser Jason Abdo, he considers Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood murderer, a hero. You have at least some foundation for trusting your Muslim neighbor’s commitment to an egalitarian, peaceable Islam compatible with democratic principles. You can begin to gauge the sincerity, perhaps even heroism, of his rejection of efforts to use democratic processes to undermine our freedoms and democracy itself.
Pietro Liberi. Victory of the Venetians over the Turks in the Dardanelles, 1656. This detail is known as “the slave of Liberi.” Liberi himself spent eight months in captivity by Tunisian pirates.
Love of neighbor is a function of charity. Caritas. It is not a squeamish denial of unwelcome realities in the name of manners, moral vanity, or any other guise intellectual dhimmitude might dress in. When it comes to giving assurances of good will, both history and current global realities place the burden of proof on Muslims themselves.
Delacroix. Massacre at Chios: Greek families awaiting death or slavery at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1822.
We do not serve ourselves—nor the ultimate well-being of our Muslim neighbors—by refusing to insist upon a self-critical attitude among Muslims. Instead of obsequious concern for Muslim sensibilities, we should seek a recasting of traditional Muslim mentalities. The desacralization of jihad is one place to start. Recognition of the secular nature of political power (“Grant unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.”) and abolition of the institutionalized concept of dhimmi is another. Anything less acquiesces in an obliterating force that believes itself destined to turn our own civilization into a graveyard.
Victim of honor killing in Berlin, August 4, 2011
March 19th, 2013 | 7:35 am
Thanks for writing this. These points should be made, and heard, in all kinds of places where they would never be welcomed and will never be heard. When I hear (over the grinding of my teeth) Christians blithely talking about “dialog” with Islam, I ask them: after you take historical, textual, and social criticism off the table –as a concession to the tender feelings of their interlocutors– what’s left to talk about? How much you hate the Jews? Moreover, a true picture of Islam is incomplete without the witness of those –non-Muslims– compelled to suffer under it (e.g. Bishops Taban and Akio of Sudan), unless one believes there can, after all, be peace –salaam—without justice.
March 19th, 2013 | 11:11 am
“The witness of those compelled to suffer under Islam”—who troubles to listen? It is easier not to.
Or so it seems from the silence about the issue from our pulpits.
March 19th, 2013 | 12:32 pm
Peace without justice. That is the condition of the dhimmi.
Thank you, Mike Walsh, for the phrase.
March 19th, 2013 | 6:19 pm
I think your reading of Homeland is plainly wrong.
The show’s two most sympathetic characters are CIA operatives haunted by the tragedy of Sept. 11 and committed to doing all they can to prevent another attack.
The captured U.S. soldier’s embrace of Islam and collaboration with his captors is revealed to be a consequence of torture, of kindness extended toward him in order to manipulate him, and of a kind of Stockholm syndrome.
Abu Nazir, the chief you mention, is a terrorist long before his young son is killed in a drone attack that is as much a consequence of his choices as it is a spur to more terrorist plots.
The local mosque in VA, too, while presented as worthy of respect, is nevertheless frequented by several people who are engaged in terrorist plots against the U.S.
Given all this, I find the claim that the show is bending over backward to present some sanitized and universally positive view of Islam confusing. That claim doesn’t at all fit my understanding of Homeland, and it makes me suspicious that you’re using the show to advance an argument you wanted to make anyway.
March 19th, 2013 | 8:19 pm
Episode nine, which is the one I watched, is everything I said it was. Carrie, the CIA gal, was not under torture when she respectfully scarfed herself to investigate a murder in Virginia. Nor was she impelled by torture to chide her colleague for not taking off his shoes at a murder scene which just happened to be in a mosque. The viewer is expected to frown at the colleague for his insensitivity. Her disapproval is a cue to the audience.
The scriptwriters were not under torture to design a sympathetic Al Queda chief. Or to give Brody the wondrous excuse for becoming Muslim: “They didn’t have the King James Version in jail.” Nor did anyone involved in writing the script have to be waterboarded to have the lovely CIA operative go rogue by sleeping with her target once the Constitutional sanctions on video surveillance had turned up . . . well, no cigar. If you can buy that, I have a bridge to sell you.
That said, I can honestly admit that I am pleased to know the remainder of the series marshals itself to——on your word——know which side it is on. I had decided not to bother with another episode. Your email prompts me to stick with it a tad longer. For all our sakes, I hope it will be worth the time.
More significantly, I wonder why you defend a TV show but have nothing at all to say about the argument I presented. There is an imbalance in priorities here.
March 19th, 2013 | 8:48 pm
Don’t feel the need to watch further on my say so, by any means. We can have different tastes.
The examples you give suggest that you understand the show to be unequivocally endorsing all of these characters. I find this problematic. But let’s set that aside for the time being.
I didn’t feel I could respond to your argument because if this show is, in your view, a fictional example of “bending over every which way” to accommodate an unrealistically rosy view of Islam without accounting for its genuine problems, then I doubt we could agree on what would constitute that “bending over every which way” in real life. If I don’t readily recognize the problem you’re identifying, it makes it difficult for me to respond.
Nevertheless, if you insist that I must respond to demonstrate that my priorities are well-ordered, I’ll give it a try.
I would agree in full that it is impossible to give the benefit of the doubt to abstractions like “Muslims-in-General” (or for that matter “Christians-in-general,” “plumbers-in-general,” “philosophers-in-general”, or “journalists-in-general”). Giving the benefit of the doubt is necessarily an interpersonal activity.
However, I might press you to consider whether a category like “militant Islam” isn’t also an abstraction. In reality, none of us encounters “militant Islam” any more than we do “Muslims-in-General.” We encounter specific people who think and act in certain ways, and it is for us to discover which of them are benign and trustworthy and which are not.
However, in the absence of evidence one way or the other, I do not think it demonstrates “obsequious concern for Muslim sensibilities” to try to act with understanding and respect. No matter how mean some of the members of my church were, my mother still asked me to remove my hat in deference to their sensitivities.
March 19th, 2013 | 8:53 pm
God bless your mother’s advice, Christopher. I can only add that
our lives are at stake here. Our civilization is at stake. That
counts for more than anyone’s sensitivities.
March 23rd, 2013 | 10:50 am
We need informed criticism of the 7th art, filmmaking, if only to understand that it can be bent to propaganda, something that we do not perceive in the heat of emotion.
But one must take a cautious view to Islam. William T. Cavanaugh’s “Myth of Religious Violence” is a good read when it comes to de-mythologizing a lot of what is in the air these days: http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Religious-Violence-Ideology-Conflict/dp/0195385047/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1364050021&sr=1-1&keywords=myth+of+religious+violence
March 23rd, 2013 | 11:21 am
Thank you for the link, Rachelle. Not having read the book, I am wary of commenting. But what comes to mind when I hear that word demythologizing in relation to Islamic violence is the incontrovertible, historic fact that Islam spread by the sword. From its inception. And today it is at war with its neighbors throughout the globe.
Again, I did not read the book. But it is fair to say that we in the West have to be extremely careful of apologists for Islam. (e.g. John Esposito, endowed by the Saudis, and non-scholar Karen Armstrong who drifts from one religion to another while getting each of them wrong.)
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