Recommended reading: the meat

[ by Charles Cameron — a couple of courteous debates on topics of considerable interest ]

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I’d like to draw your attention to two recent conversations:

The first begins with Mark Jacobsen‘s Armed Forces Journal piece, How to teach about Islam, and continues with a guest post from Tim Mathews at Abu Muqawama, Insha’Allah they learn something useful. Mark then responds to Tim at his own blog, Building Peace.

Mark lays out the problem:

Much of the debate now hinges on which voices educators should trust. The question is no longer “What is Islam?” but “Who should teach about Islam?” Government agencies struggle to answer that question, because they often feel compelled to choose between two camps: those who believe extremism is intrinsic to Islam itself, and those who see no relationship whatsoever between Islamic doctrine and extremism. Although much thoughtful and scholarly discussion of Islam does exist, it is these two camps who now dominate the popular conversation.

Government agencies will never escape their dilemma if they continue searching for an authority who can speak for “true” Islam. Islam is a deeply contested religion, even among Muslims, and the arguments of both extremes are shot through with truth, falsehood, exaggerations, omissions and assumptions. Much of the debate about Islam in the United States is intellectually dishonest. Rival voices are less concerned with sincere discussion than with heavy-handed tactics to dominate the conversation, such as efforts to control government classrooms. The only way out of this dilemma is also the most intellectually honest one: to understand the battle for American perceptions of Islam, to map out the topography of the debate and to teach students to critically evaluate rival arguments.

Tim responds:

As should be clear, I agree with problems that the author identifies in the US. However, I fail to see what this has to do with the issue of educating our personnel. We are not training our personnel to be foot soldiers in a culture war fought on cable television and weblogs in the United States. We are training our personnel to conduct operations in foreign countries.

[ … ]

The problem that he identifies is not relevant to preparing our personnel for deployments to conduct, and provide support for, operations in majority-Muslim countries. What the author has advocated is a program to help our educators avoid being pulled into battles of a culture war on US soil and, along the way, educating our personnel. The primary focus should be educating and the secondary focus on mitigating public pressure from fringe organizations.

Mark’s response:

I’m very glad to see your thoughtful response to my article. More than anything, I had hoped to spark some discussion about how Islam is taught in various government agencies, so am glad to see you carrying the discussion forward.

[ … ]

One reason you might disagree with aspects of my article is because you viewed it primarily through the lens of preparing deploying soldiers. That is an important part of what I’m writing about, but I actually intended the article to encompass a much broader range of government needs. Government employees have many different reasons they might need to understand something about Islam. Congressmen and their staffs are trying to make sense of the alleged “shariah threat” and calls for anti-shariah legislation; law enforcement agencies and the FBI need a way to understand and delineate between “moderates” and “extremists”, so they can hone in on real threats while respecting the civil liberties of ordinary Muslims; military commanders concerned with preventing the next Ft. Hood want to know how they can recognize extremist ideology; government agencies involved in any sort of outreach to Muslim communities struggle to find partners they can work with, because the largest American-Islamic organizations that claim to speak for American Muslims are tarnished by alleged links to extremism and terrorism.

All three pieces are worth reading in full — it was hard to pull quotes that did any of them justice, they’re all packed! And FWIW I do think Mark is right in ranging beyond the constraints of “preparing our personnel for deployments” — Tim’s more focused concern — because the war of ideas is won or lost as much in terms of how the US is perceived WRT Islam as it is by the behavior of troops, village by village, “in the field”.

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