Welcome friends!
Have you read the news stories about the small South-East Asian country of Brunei deciding they should execute gay people if someone discovers them having sex with one another? Yes, indeed, and apparently by the medieval and rather tortuous method of execution known as “stoning” no less. Apparently it’s all meant to be based in Sharia, Islamic religious law. The intent of the authorities in adopting these draconian punishments at least according to government spokesperson Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah is to “see Islamic teachings in this country grow stronger.” According to a fellow named Mathew Woolfe, founder of a human rights group called The Brunei Project, one likely practical reason Brunei has decided to start murdering gay people right now is the country’s interest in “attracting more investment from the Muslim world, along with more Islamic tourists.” He opines this latest move “could be seen as one way of appealing to that market.” I’m not sure whether Mr. Woolfe had in mind Islamic tourists showing up specifically for the stonings, perhaps as part of some sort of public festival of torture and murder, think the worst of medieval Europe but with hummus on pita rather than beef on a stick, or whether he meant simply Islamic tourists would likely be more comfortable vacationing in a country that kills gay people. And by the way, it’s not just gay people up for the chop. The new law also involves killing people for “insult or defamation of the Prophet Muhammad.” Clearly the traditional American values of freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, and free speech have no place in an Islamic paradise like Brunei. I say paradise because according to the article I saw Brunei’s ruling royals possess a huge private fortunate and “its largely ethnic Malay residents enjoy generous state handouts and pay no taxes.” I’m imagining fat, lazy, spoiled, berobed people lolling about on divans and carpets smoking hashish and watching their servants being whipped, but of course I’ve never been there so I might be thinking of an old movie. What difference is it to me anyway? I don’t live in Brunei. I will certainly never travel to Brunei or really any other locale in the majority Islamic regions of the world. Ever. The vast gulf in our values and ethics precludes that possibility. I’d like to just laugh it all off the way one laughs off all the other peculiar things people in foreign climes get up to that have nothing to do with one personally. Unfortunately, one small step removed from what happens in ostensible devout Islamic Brunei is the awkward fact we have quite a few Muslims living here in the USA as well. Should we be worried? Well, yes and no. Let’s discuss.
This is clearly one facet of a very major and serious problem. Here in the USA a great many people have a great deal of unease over Muslim immigration partly or more likely largely because of the obvious and indisputable fact that the values and ethics of the greater part of the Islamic world don’t align very closely or indeed at all with the traditional values and ethics of modern western democracies such as the USA. A common and entirely understandable sentiment is that most Muslims would probably feel much more comfortable and indeed much happier living someplace other than the USA. Indeed, moving to the USA seems rather a recipe for disaster or at least the production of some very, very confused and alienated young people. Yet perversely a certain number of Muslims insist upon immigrating to the USA, where of course we accept them into our society no matter the obvious potential and indeed likelihood of their holding and espousing views offensive to us because, well, that’s our way. Until they act upon their offensive views and peculiar ethics of course, say by murdering a gay person or blowing up a nightclub full of loose women or what have you, in which case we kill them or at least throw them in prison for what one hopes is a very, very long time. We have plenty of other people in this same general category, by the way. It’s not just Muslims. We have any number of domestic anti-democratic hate groups in this country and they’re all allowed to think and talk whatever rot they like until they act on their beliefs and kill or maim someone, in which case it’s the same deal: we either kill them or toss them in jail for what one hopes is a very, very long time.
The American way of accepting this sort of problematic and challenging diversity must seem quite odd to our foreign friends as well as to some of our domestic blockheads who never got the memo so perhaps a few words of explanation may be in order. It involves maintaining a healthy realm of personal freedom. The presumption lying behind our approach is that what people say and profess to think does not always align very closely with what people actually do, particularly when the state and the law is involved. One may want to kill gay people, believe one’s ethics require one to kill gay people, and wish the state would, in fact, kill gay people, but when it comes to flouting the law of the land and murdering some random gay passersby on the street one may see things differently.
This can happen any number of ways and for any number of reasons. One may subscribe to some sort of generalized “one should obey the law” or “do as the Roman’s do” ethical belief so even though one feels the law is wrong in some instances one feels a moral obligation to go along with it whatever it is. I’ve personally never heard of that being part of Sharia of course, but one supposes individual Muslims might mash up Sharia, general Islamic ethics, and various bits of ethical reasoning from who knows where, so that’s certainly a possibility.
In other cases, one supposes simple cowardice and fear of legal consequences may play a role. One may believe it’s perfectly ethical to murder gay people but the prospect of the state ending one’s own life if one acts ethically may make one take a rather more reflective and philosophical as opposed to active perspective on one’s ethics.
Another issue of course is it’s not entirely clear if all self-described Muslims say or profess to think the same things. Even though the belief Sharia calls for the murder of gay people appears to be quite common in Islamic circles, at least I’ve heard it espoused in various places by various Muslims with various religions credentials and does not appear at all specific to the theological stylings of the government of Brunei, the religion of Islam, like Christianity and indeed most of the big religions, seems prone to a certain degree of interpretation. Among Christians here in the USA anyway “following” the Christian religion quite often means in practice shopping about for a priest, or a church, or a sect, that espouses a version or interpretation of Christian ethics that corresponds to one’s personal ethics, which might always of course be based on one’s own study of scripture but one suspects might equally involve ethics arriving from other places such as angels sitting on one’s shoulders whispering religious insights into one’s little ears or from other more conventional religious or philosophical sources or indeed even from simple introspection and the consultation of one’s own moral sentiments, emotions, and feelings about what seems right. To a large extent contemporary Christianity is basically whatever one wants it to be. Now I must admit I’m not aware of different sects in the Islamic religion or the prevalence of Mosque shopping, but I suspect that may have more to do with my ignorance of that particular religion than an actual dearth of options for practicing Muslims. One other hand, I have read a number of people arguing there is little centralized control over official Islamic theology and as a result at least some room for different beliefs about what Islam and Sharia really entail. Where one Islamic scholar may find Sharia requires the stoning to death of gay people another might well interpret the relevant material as suggesting one should simply disapprove of gay people in some more general and less bloody and horrific way. I suppose a few daring independent minded Muslims might even interpret the whole thing as a big misunderstanding and attempt to accommodate modern scientific knowledge of human sexuality. Reformed Muslims, if there is any such thing.
So where does that leave us? What is the point? What should be we actually do about the Islamic threat to our traditional culture and values? Well, I think we recognize and face the challenges posed by the presence of our Muslim friends head on but nevertheless maintain our traditional values and accept them as we accept everyone with unusual and offensive views. In other words, let’s not go all crazy. Yes, having Muslim neighbors would understandably make one rather nervous. Sharia appears to cover an awful lot of ground and according to some Muslims anyway involve quite a bit of violence. One never knows whether one’s Muslim neighbor is about to launch himself or herself over the garden gate kitchen knife or meat cleaver in hand to dispatch whatever gay person, infidel, insulter of the Islamic religion, alcohol drinker, shaved person, or what have you may be standing on the other side. In that sense having a Muslim neighbor is rather like having a neighbor with a swastika or the letters KKK carved into his or her forehead. But our tradition is to not overreact to these sorts of superficial provocations. Live and let live, that’s our way. Let people work things out on their own and in their own time and in the meantime pay rather more attention to what they do than what they say. Stories in the news explaining what foreign potentates in faraway lands believe Islam entails may or may not resonate with your Muslim neighbors here in the USA. Extend the same consideration to your other neighbor of course, the one was with the swastika or KKK carved into his or her forehead. Perhaps the offending inscription was the result of some past mental illness or youthful ignorance or a bit of drunken tomfoolery. Or maybe it doesn’t represent what that person is really all about but is just for show, something for the benefit of other people, something to make granddaddy happy. Give people the benefit of the doubt until they show their true colors through their actions; that’s really the American way. But of course if you have unusual neighbors and you have a notion to avoid them and lock your doors at night and buy a higher garden gate, … well, those might be good ideas as well. Awkward to be sure, but then no one ever said freedom was easy or free of risk.
References
Brunei implements stoning to death under anti-LGBT laws. Yvette Tan. BBC News. April 3, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-47769964
