Submission, Fitna, and some Parentheses

Fitna and Submission are both films that appeal to emotion more than reason, but they do so with different emphases, and even different intentions.

Submission, as the more personal of the two, appeals more to the compassion of individuals. As a device for drawing attention to a particular issue, and generating sympathy for a particular understanding of that issue, it is effective. It doesn’t help me form an educated opinion on the issue, but that’s not its purpose.

Fitna has a wider scope, portraying Islam not just as a source of internal oppression, but as one of global violence, intolerance, and totalitarianism. Yet its facts are extremely sparse, and most of its scenes are devoid of context, so that what it amounts to is a series of antagonizing images. The first five sixths of the film has no rational argument, but in going way beyond the personal narrative of Submission, its suggestion is much stronger. Projected onto the pages of a Quran, the scenes, though they have already taken place, have the strange appearance of a dystopian prophecy—and of course they are meant to. But in order to be more than an emotional suggestion, Fitna needs to cite sources. Again, this isn’t really the point, but it does mean that the film should fail to convince many who are not already sympathetic; its main effect should be to increase the fervor of those who are.

Fitna, along with Afshin Ellian (MIA, p. 25), claim that Islam is a problem because it advocates intolerance and violence where Western laws require tolerance and freedom of expression, and Islam trumps Western law for many who believe in it. Muslims should not be allowed to live in Western Europe unless they recognize the same laws as other citizens. This is a compelling argument—that Islam and Law are mutually exclusive—but the focus is misguided. The laws have been rejected, revised, and have evolved continually over the centuries. Therefore, if an ideology is in conflict with them, it does not immediately make the ideology problematic. The Enlightenment, for instance, was one such conflicting ideology.

Is there a difference between the Enlightenment and Islam? Or does the legitimacy of one simply come from its popularity? Obviously, I don’t believe that the two are equal, but to say that one is better than the other means that I must believe in some universal set of values against which I can judge them. I know I’m not supposed to use this kind of disclaimer, but I want to acknowledge before I go back to taking my ideological bias for granted that I believe that at a low enough level it’s impossible to make a rational argument for one universal belief over another. That is, any “inherent” benefits that Enlightenment philosophy has over fundamentalist Islam can only be expressed in self-referential terms, and vice versa (unless you go to a really low level, like atoms and photons, in which case value is sort of hard to assign at all). At some point, then, the choice is a matter of preference—and often a pragmatic one. Having said that, I will assert that tolerance is better than intolerance, and peace is better than violence, and, therefore, the laws that uphold these values should take precedence over Islam or any other (possibly conflicting) religion.

But my point is that this is really a conflict of universal ideologies, not a conflict between religion and law. Actually, Buruma makes a similar argument, that the conflict “is not a straightforward clash between culture and universalism, but between two different versions of the universal, one radically secular, the other radically religious” (p. 32). This differentiation between culture and ideology is critical, because it is the only way to avoid the clash becoming a racist conflict. That is, if cultural tolerance is going to work in the face of this ideological confrontation (however much it continues to manifest itself in individuals), Enlightenment ideas must be thoroughly divorced from (and given preeminence over) the specificities of Western cultures, just as the Western conception of fundamentalist Islam must be separated from the Western view of the specificities of Muslim culture. How much of this separation will actually occur I don’t know, but I guess we could always take a survey.