balls of purest crystal

Justin Logan, substituting over at Unqualified Offerings, finds Reuel Marc Gerecht serene at the thought of an Islamic Iraq.

In 1900, women did not have the right to vote. If Iraqis could develop a democracy that resembled America in the 1900s, I think we’d all be thrilled. I mean, women’s social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy.

Shorter version: Women of Iraq! Veil your faces to save America’s. To be fair, this is a pretty consistent line followed by Gerecht. See here:

Many American liberals and neoconservatives think that you somehow get to have Thomas Jefferson in the Middle East without first having Martin Luther. The fundamentalists—not the “moderates” who are already too evolved—will produce the Muslim Martin Luther.

On one level it was obvious that a post-Saddam Iraq would always be more Islamic than Iraq under Ba’athist rule. But the problem with Gerecht’s grand sweep of history is that it misses out certain details by concentrating entirely on the progress of religious thought in politics. If you’re taking a supposed path from Luther to Jefferson as your model you have to include the counter-reformation and the Thirty Years War. You also have to account for the fact that Jefferson was separated from Luther by 200-odd years, the Atlantic ocean and a completely different political culture. You might as well argue that a reformed Islamic Iraq will lead to moderate Muslim rule in Japan sometime around the year 2300. Meanwhile, it's the Thirty Years War bit that worries me.

Comments

[dsquared]

It's yer man George O again, innit?

"When you admonish a revolutionary for the bloodshed he is causing, he says you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. When you ask where's the omelette, he tells you Rome wasn't built in a day".

[Alex]

This is quite simply amazingly fucking stupid - a category of rhetoric I'm forced to invoke more and more often. It's entirely clear that the Shia-Kurdish alliance (Motto: I'll Scratch Your Back, So That Way You're Facing Away From Me And Hence Can't Stab Me In Mine) has given the Sunnis three days to surrender, or they'll whip the constitution through with their majority. It's a declaration of civil war timed to go off in three days.

[jamie]

...with a state divided along "national" (Kurd/Arab) and confesional (Shia/Sunni) faultines, proliferating militias, private armies and all sorts of interested foreign parties contending for different sides. The more I think about it, the more Iraq looks like Germany circa 1618.

[chris]

It'd be nice if everybody got over this "Muslim reformation" stuff soonish, because it's completely fatuous.

There are no useful analogies between present day western Asia and 16th century Europe, not least because present day western Asia exists in the context of a world where all the knock-ons from events in 16th century Europe have actually happened, and any views prevalent there that anybody doesn't particularly like have emerged in that context. (God, this is primary school stuff.)

The only useful point Gerecht makes (accidentally as far as I can see), is that a lot of people who ought to know better don't understand the difference between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Sadly true, but it belongs in a discussion about educational standards rather than international policy.