http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HB07Ak02.html

Middle East
Feb 7, 2006

Why can't Muslims take a joke?
By Spengler

Religious humor has become commonplace in the secular
West, but it came with a price.

More than any people on Earth, the Danes should know the
terrible price of religious humor, for the first great Christian humorist
arose from their dour midst as if by immaculate conception. "Humor is
intrinsic to Christianity," wrote Soren Kierkegaard, because "truth is
hidden in mystery". But Kierkegaard the humorist was sent to the Danes
after
the Enlightenment had laid waste to Christianity, that is, after the
French
revolutionary army had conquered traditional Europe. He wielded humor out
of desperation, after Denmark already had started down its long slide
toward
secularism.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HB07Ak02.html

Middle East
Feb 7, 2006

Why can't Muslims take a joke?
By Spengler

Religious humor has become commonplace in the secular
West, but it came with a price.

More than any people on Earth, the Danes should know the
terrible price of religious humor, for the first great Christian humorist
arose from their dour midst as if by immaculate conception. "Humor is
intrinsic to Christianity," wrote Soren Kierkegaard, because "truth is
hidden in mystery". But Kierkegaard the humorist was sent to the Danes
after
the Enlightenment had laid waste to Christianity, that is, after the
French
revolutionary army had conquered traditional Europe. He wielded humor out
of desperation, after Denmark already had started down its long slide
toward
secularism.

Like Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady, muses the secular
West after the Danish cartoon catastrophe, "Why can't a Muslim be more
like
a Jew?" After all, Arab newspapers daily publish hideous caricatures of
Jews, who do not burn down Arab embassies in response. But the Jews
learned
to swallow humiliation at a dreadful cost. When Rome defiled their temple
at
Jerusalem in AD 66, the Jews rebelled. Rome crushed them, but they rose
again in AD 132, fighting more Roman legions under Hadrian than had
conquered Britain. After most Jews were dead or exiled, the remnant
invented
self-deprecating humor. [1]

Deprecatory cartoons of Jesus would have earned you the
dungeon or the stake during most of Christianity's 2,000-year history.
Britain still has not abolished the Blasphemous Libel Law against mockery
of
the Church of England, although the last Englishman punished for blasphemy
was a certain William Gott, who received nine months' imprisonment in 1922
for comparing Jesus to a circus clown.

"To hell with them if they can't take a joke!"
artillerymen say after one of their shells kills their own comrades.
Mockery
cuts a swath of destruction through traditional society, which, experience
tells us, often dies hard - by the hand of a Hadrian, or a Napoleon. The
Jyllens-Posten cartoon affair is even worse than it looks. The Mohammed
cartoons are tame compared with other topics that the mainstream media
avoid. The cartoon controversy barely qualifies as a skirmish in a greater
war.

With freedom of choice and access to information come
doubt. Western scholars doubt whether Mohammed ever existed [2] or, if he
existed, whether the Koran was invented two centuries after his death, or
indeed whether the Koran even was written in Arabic. Christianity and
Judaism are bloodied - indeed, drained almost dry - by nearly two
centuries
of scriptural criticism; Islam's turn barely has begun.

More revealing than the refusal of the mainstream
American
media to repost the Mohammed cartoons is the disappearance of more
dangerous
material previously available. Newsweek's "Challenging the Koran" story of
July 28, 2003, has vanished from the magazine's website. The government of
Pakistan had banned that issue, which among other things reported a German
philologist's contention that the Koran was written in Syriac rather than
classical Arabic, translating the "virgins" of Paradise as "raisins". As I
observed before, the topic of Koranic criticism has disappeared from the
mainstream media. Since the suppression of the Newsweek story the Western
media have steered clear of the subject.

It is well and good for Western newspapers to republish
the Mohammed cartoons in solidarity with Jyllens-Posten. But not one major
news outlet has reported the most controversial religion story of the
year,
the debate among the pope and his advisers about whether and to what
extent
Islam is capable of reform (see When even the pope has to whisper, January
10). Close friends accused me of endangering the life of Pope Benedict XVI
by publishing a report already available on the Internet. If it is true
that
the pope cannot speak to the subject for fear of assassination, then he is
a
prisoner in the Vatican as much as was the unfortunate wartime pope Pius
XII.

Muslims rage at affronts to their faith because the
modern
world puts their faith at risk, precisely as modern Islamists contend. [3]
That is not a Muslim problem as such, for all faith is challenged as
traditional society gives ground to globalization. But Muslim countries,
whose traditional life shows a literacy rate of only 60%, face a century
of
religious deracination. Christianity and Judaism barely have adapted to
the
modern world; the Islamists believe with good reason that Islam cannot
co-exist with modernism and propose to shut it out altogether.

Doubt has all but killed Christian and Jewish faith,
despite the efforts of the theologians to tame it. Doubt is indispensable
to
faith, wrote Pope Benedict in 1967 when he was the young theologian Joseph
Ratzinger: "It is the basic pattern of man's destiny only to be allowed to
find the finality of his existence in this unceasing rivalry between doubt
and belief, temptation and certainty." The Gates of Hell, however, have
won
more rounds than St Peter. As Cardinal Avery Dulles told Paul Elie of
Atlantic Monthly in January:

The breakdown of traditional societies and the
indifference of modern people to religious faith have left us with a
burden
of re-evangelization ... Germany and the Low Countries give us no reason
to
be optimistic. Quebec is a desert. Ireland is very nearly lost to
prosperity
... With [American] society's freedom of choice come our selfishness and
competition, which are now being exported all over the world. We are not
immune to the forces of secularization that are being felt in Europe. Is
the
Christian residue in America strong enough to resist them? I worry that it
is not.

With stable institutions and material wealth, the secular
West evinces a slow decline. Not so the Muslim world, where loss of faith
implies sudden deracination and ruin. In the space of a generation, Islam
must make an adjustment that Christianity made with great difficulty over
half a millennium. Both for theological and social reasons, it is
unequipped
to do so. Muslims might as well fight over a cartoon now; they have very
little to lose.

Throughout the world, literacy erodes traditional
society,
and the collapse of traditional society leads to declining population
growth
rates. But in the Muslim world these trends hit like a shock wave. Both
the
traditional life of Muslims as well as Muslim theology have been frozen in
time, such that Muslims are repeating in compressed time trends long at
work
in the West. The result is devastating.

Most members of religious groups adhere to their beliefs
because they were born into a faith and learned no other way to live.
Traditional society admits of no heresy or atheism because religion
governs
the socialization of individuals. Once a traditional people has the
opportunity to choose its beliefs, however, the result most often is a
sudden fall-off in religious practice. We observe a close statistical
relationship between literacy and the percentage of non-religious people
in
a population in the cross-section of countries.

Once the literacy rate reaches 90%, the percentage of
non-religious jumps into two digits. That is as true for Muslim countries
as
well as for non-Muslim countries. Because the Muslim literacy rate is so
far
below the average, though, few Muslim countries have a high proportion of
non-religious people.

Globally, we discern a clear link among literacy,
secularism, and birth rates; the high birth rates of traditional society
fall sharply with greater literacy and weaker religious belief. In the
non-Muslim world (Exhibit 2), literacy alone explains 46% of variation in
population growth.

In the Muslim world, however, the link between rising
literacy and falling population growth is much more pronounced. In the
Muslim world (Exhibit 3), variation in literacy explains nearly 60% of the
variation in population growth, not a surprising result considering that
the
Muslim world begins with extremely high population growth and extremely
low
literacy rates.

Of all the large Muslim countries, Iran is most at risk,
with a literacy rate of 71% and a population growth rate of 1.3%,
projected
to decline to zero within a generation. I have elaborated elsewhere on the
devastating implications of a large population of dependent aged for a
poor
country (Demographics and Iran's imperial design, September 13, 2005).
These
considerations prompted me to predict early on that Iranian President
Mahmud
Ahmadinejad no more would shrink from confrontation with the West than did
Adolf Hitler. But the rest of the Muslim world faces the same pressures.

The global relationship among literacy rates,
secularization and population growth makes clear that the fragility of
Muslim traditional society is not a Muslim problem as such. But the Muslim
world is far more vulnerable than the numbers suggest, for two reasons.
The
first reason is chronological, and the second is theological.

It is not a good thing to come late to the table of
globalization. China and its neighbors have emerged from the maelstrom of
revolution and the violent loss of tens of millions of lives to become
actors on the world economic stage. Of China's 1.3 billion people, 400
million are integrated into the world division of labor, and millions more
are becoming urbanized, literate and productive by the year. India remains
behind China but has good prospects for success. Against these formidable
competitors, few countries in Western Asia, Africa or Latin America can
hope
to prevail. In a world that has little need of subsistence farmers and
even
less need of university graduates with degrees in Islamic philosophy, most
of the Muslim world can expect small mercy from the market.

The theological problem I have discussed in other
locations, most recently in reporting the pope's seminar at
Castelgandolfo.
Christianity and Judaism have adapted to doubt, the bacillus of modern
thought, by inviting doubt to serve as the handmaiden of faith. No better
formulation of this can be found than in Benedict XVI's classic
Introduction
to Christianity. The object of revelation, the believer, becomes a
participant in revelation, in dialogue with the Revealer. This great
innovation has not prevented the death of traditional, autonomic Christian
belief, but it has left an enduring core of Christian faith in the West
well
inoculated against skepticism. As the pope explained, the eternal,
unchanging character of the Koran that the Archangel Gabriel dictated
verbatim to Mohammed admits of no doubt. Muslim belief is not dialogue,
but
submission. It is as defenseless before the bacillus of skepticism as the
American aboriginals were before the smallpox virus.

That is why Muslims cannot respond to Western jibes at
the
person of their Prophet except as they did to the Jyllens-Posten cartoons.
I
do not sympathize with scoffers but, like Benedict, I see doubt as an
adversary to be won over, rather than as an enemy to be extirpated. I
would
not have drawn nor published these cartoons, but when the lines are drawn,
I
stand with Western freedom against traditional authority. I write these
lines over a Carlsberg and shall drink no other lager until the boycott of
Danish product ends.

Notes
1. On February 2 fell the 150th death anniversary of the
greatest of Jewish humorists, the poet Heinrich Heine. Heine knew that
Jewish humor was a salve, not a cure, for humiliation. In a poem called
"To
Edom", using the rabbis' ancient derogatory term for the Christian world,
Heine remonstrated that Christians and Jews "tolerate each other
fraternally. I tolerate your rages, and you tolerate my breathing." He
also
wrote (as translated by Aaron Kramer):
"And the tears flow on forever
Southward in silent ranks
They flow to the Jordan river
And overrun the banks."

2. See for example Crossroads to Islam, by Yehuda Nevo
and
Judith Koren (Prometheus Books: New York 2003).

3. See Crisis of Faith in the Muslim World Part 2: The
Islamist response, November 8, 2005.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and
republishing .)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HB07Ak02.html

Middle East
Feb 7, 2006

Why can't Muslims take a joke?
By Spengler

Religious humor has become commonplace in the secular
West, but it came with a price.

More than any people on Earth, the Danes should know the
terrible price of religious humor, for the first great Christian humorist
arose from their dour midst as if by immaculate conception. "Humor is
intrinsic to Christianity," wrote Soren Kierkegaard, because "truth is
hidden in mystery". But Kierkegaard the humorist was sent to the Danes
after
the Enlightenment had laid waste to Christianity, that is, after the French
revolutionary army had conquered traditional Europe. He wielded humor out
of desperation, after Denmark already had started down its long slide
toward
secularism.

Like Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady, muses the secular
West after the Danish cartoon catastrophe, "Why can't a Muslim be more like
a Jew?" After all, Arab newspapers daily publish hideous caricatures of
Jews, who do not burn down Arab embassies in response. But the Jews learned
to swallow humiliation at a dreadful cost. When Rome defiled their
temple at
Jerusalem in AD 66, the Jews rebelled. Rome crushed them, but they rose
again in AD 132, fighting more Roman legions under Hadrian than had
conquered Britain. After most Jews were dead or exiled, the remnant
invented
self-deprecating humor. [1]

Deprecatory cartoons of Jesus would have earned you the
dungeon or the stake during most of Christianity's 2,000-year history.
Britain still has not abolished the Blasphemous Libel Law against
mockery of
the Church of England, although the last Englishman punished for blasphemy
was a certain William Gott, who received nine months' imprisonment in 1922
for comparing Jesus to a circus clown.

"To hell with them if they can't take a joke!"
artillerymen say after one of their shells kills their own comrades.
Mockery
cuts a swath of destruction through traditional society, which, experience
tells us, often dies hard - by the hand of a Hadrian, or a Napoleon. The
Jyllens-Posten cartoon affair is even worse than it looks. The Mohammed
cartoons are tame compared with other topics that the mainstream media
avoid. The cartoon controversy barely qualifies as a skirmish in a greater
war.

With freedom of choice and access to information come
doubt. Western scholars doubt whether Mohammed ever existed [2] or, if he
existed, whether the Koran was invented two centuries after his death, or
indeed whether the Koran even was written in Arabic. Christianity and
Judaism are bloodied - indeed, drained almost dry - by nearly two centuries
of scriptural criticism; Islam's turn barely has begun.

More revealing than the refusal of the mainstream American
media to repost the Mohammed cartoons is the disappearance of more
dangerous
material previously available. Newsweek's "Challenging the Koran" story of
July 28, 2003, has vanished from the magazine's website. The government of
Pakistan had banned that issue, which among other things reported a German
philologist's contention that the Koran was written in Syriac rather than
classical Arabic, translating the "virgins" of Paradise as "raisins". As I
observed before, the topic of Koranic criticism has disappeared from the
mainstream media. Since the suppression of the Newsweek story the Western
media have steered clear of the subject.

It is well and good for Western newspapers to republish
the Mohammed cartoons in solidarity with Jyllens-Posten. But not one major
news outlet has reported the most controversial religion story of the year,
the debate among the pope and his advisers about whether and to what extent
Islam is capable of reform (see When even the pope has to whisper, January
10). Close friends accused me of endangering the life of Pope Benedict XVI
by publishing a report already available on the Internet. If it is true
that
the pope cannot speak to the subject for fear of assassination, then he
is a
prisoner in the Vatican as much as was the unfortunate wartime pope Pius
XII.

Muslims rage at affronts to their faith because the modern
world puts their faith at risk, precisely as modern Islamists contend. [3]
That is not a Muslim problem as such, for all faith is challenged as
traditional society gives ground to globalization. But Muslim countries,
whose traditional life shows a literacy rate of only 60%, face a century of
religious deracination. Christianity and Judaism barely have adapted to the
modern world; the Islamists believe with good reason that Islam cannot
co-exist with modernism and propose to shut it out altogether.

Doubt has all but killed Christian and Jewish faith,
despite the efforts of the theologians to tame it. Doubt is
indispensable to
faith, wrote Pope Benedict in 1967 when he was the young theologian Joseph
Ratzinger: "It is the basic pattern of man's destiny only to be allowed to
find the finality of his existence in this unceasing rivalry between doubt
and belief, temptation and certainty." The Gates of Hell, however, have won
more rounds than St Peter. As Cardinal Avery Dulles told Paul Elie of
Atlantic Monthly in January:

The breakdown of traditional societies and the
indifference of modern people to religious faith have left us with a burden
of re-evangelization ... Germany and the Low Countries give us no reason to
be optimistic. Quebec is a desert. Ireland is very nearly lost to
prosperity
... With [American] society's freedom of choice come our selfishness and
competition, which are now being exported all over the world. We are not
immune to the forces of secularization that are being felt in Europe. Is
the
Christian residue in America strong enough to resist them? I worry that it
is not.

With stable institutions and material wealth, the secular
West evinces a slow decline. Not so the Muslim world, where loss of faith
implies sudden deracination and ruin. In the space of a generation, Islam
must make an adjustment that Christianity made with great difficulty over
half a millennium. Both for theological and social reasons, it is
unequipped
to do so. Muslims might as well fight over a cartoon now; they have very
little to lose.

Throughout the world, literacy erodes traditional society,
and the collapse of traditional society leads to declining population
growth
rates. But in the Muslim world these trends hit like a shock wave. Both the
traditional life of Muslims as well as Muslim theology have been frozen in
time, such that Muslims are repeating in compressed time trends long at
work
in the West. The result is devastating.

Most members of religious groups adhere to their beliefs
because they were born into a faith and learned no other way to live.
Traditional society admits of no heresy or atheism because religion governs
the socialization of individuals. Once a traditional people has the
opportunity to choose its beliefs, however, the result most often is a
sudden fall-off in religious practice. We observe a close statistical
relationship between literacy and the percentage of non-religious people in
a population in the cross-section of countries.

Once the literacy rate reaches 90%, the percentage of
non-religious jumps into two digits. That is as true for Muslim
countries as
well as for non-Muslim countries. Because the Muslim literacy rate is so
far
below the average, though, few Muslim countries have a high proportion of
non-religious people.

Globally, we discern a clear link among literacy,
secularism, and birth rates; the high birth rates of traditional society
fall sharply with greater literacy and weaker religious belief. In the
non-Muslim world (Exhibit 2), literacy alone explains 46% of variation in
population growth.

In the Muslim world, however, the link between rising
literacy and falling population growth is much more pronounced. In the
Muslim world (Exhibit 3), variation in literacy explains nearly 60% of the
variation in population growth, not a surprising result considering that
the
Muslim world begins with extremely high population growth and extremely low
literacy rates.

Of all the large Muslim countries, Iran is most at risk,
with a literacy rate of 71% and a population growth rate of 1.3%, projected
to decline to zero within a generation. I have elaborated elsewhere on the
devastating implications of a large population of dependent aged for a poor
country (Demographics and Iran's imperial design, September 13, 2005).
These
considerations prompted me to predict early on that Iranian President
Mahmud
Ahmadinejad no more would shrink from confrontation with the West than did
Adolf Hitler. But the rest of the Muslim world faces the same pressures.

The global relationship among literacy rates,
secularization and population growth makes clear that the fragility of
Muslim traditional society is not a Muslim problem as such. But the Muslim
world is far more vulnerable than the numbers suggest, for two reasons. The
first reason is chronological, and the second is theological.

It is not a good thing to come late to the table of
globalization. China and its neighbors have emerged from the maelstrom of
revolution and the violent loss of tens of millions of lives to become
actors on the world economic stage. Of China's 1.3 billion people, 400
million are integrated into the world division of labor, and millions more
are becoming urbanized, literate and productive by the year. India remains
behind China but has good prospects for success. Against these formidable
competitors, few countries in Western Asia, Africa or Latin America can
hope
to prevail. In a world that has little need of subsistence farmers and even
less need of university graduates with degrees in Islamic philosophy, most
of the Muslim world can expect small mercy from the market.

The theological problem I have discussed in other
locations, most recently in reporting the pope's seminar at Castelgandolfo.
Christianity and Judaism have adapted to doubt, the bacillus of modern
thought, by inviting doubt to serve as the handmaiden of faith. No better
formulation of this can be found than in Benedict XVI's classic
Introduction
to Christianity. The object of revelation, the believer, becomes a
participant in revelation, in dialogue with the Revealer. This great
innovation has not prevented the death of traditional, autonomic Christian
belief, but it has left an enduring core of Christian faith in the West
well
inoculated against skepticism. As the pope explained, the eternal,
unchanging character of the Koran that the Archangel Gabriel dictated
verbatim to Mohammed admits of no doubt. Muslim belief is not dialogue, but
submission. It is as defenseless before the bacillus of skepticism as the
American aboriginals were before the smallpox virus.

That is why Muslims cannot respond to Western jibes at the
person of their Prophet except as they did to the Jyllens-Posten
cartoons. I
do not sympathize with scoffers but, like Benedict, I see doubt as an
adversary to be won over, rather than as an enemy to be extirpated. I would
not have drawn nor published these cartoons, but when the lines are
drawn, I
stand with Western freedom against traditional authority. I write these
lines over a Carlsberg and shall drink no other lager until the boycott of
Danish product ends.

Notes
1. On February 2 fell the 150th death anniversary of the
greatest of Jewish humorists, the poet Heinrich Heine. Heine knew that
Jewish humor was a salve, not a cure, for humiliation. In a poem called "To
Edom", using the rabbis' ancient derogatory term for the Christian world,
Heine remonstrated that Christians and Jews "tolerate each other
fraternally. I tolerate your rages, and you tolerate my breathing." He also
wrote (as translated by Aaron Kramer):
"And the tears flow on forever
Southward in silent ranks
They flow to the Jordan river
And overrun the banks."

2. See for example Crossroads to Islam, by Yehuda Nevo and
Judith Koren (Prometheus Books: New York 2003).

3. See Crisis of Faith in the Muslim World Part 2: The
Islamist response, November 8, 2005.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and
republishing .)