National Review contributor Andrew McCarthy's criticism yesterday of press agency Reuters, in conjunction with an apparently independent gang in the Gaza Strip having released kidnapped journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, was probably well-deserved. Yet McCarthy went a step further and asked if "'mainstream' Muslim experts" will disavow the kidnappers' Saracenical conversion of Centanni and Wiig to Islam. The act, by itself, was coercive, accomplished through such liturgical devices as sleep deprivation and firearms leveled at point-blank range, and perhaps not amputative surgery only because both men were likely rid of the prepuce at birth.
Is there "no compulsion" in Muslim proselytizing, and is jihad "the inner struggle against sin"? — McCarthy's rhetorical question is his own answer in the negative. If this sentiment were to reflect the conservative right's focus on Islam — rather than authoritarian culture — as the catalyst for terrorism and non-state mayhem, it brings the traditionalists to an uncomfortable set of propositions. I wrote about the absurd logical ends of this argumentation a year ago and again just recently.
The first problem is one of definition. If a religious identity (in this case, Muslim) is legitimate by declaration alone, remaining unimpeachable regardless of behavior, then by consequence membership is of nominal value and by corollary the tenets of the faith are meaningless. McCarthy is suggesting that Muslims, even those at the Council for American-Islamic Relations who are reliably antipathetic to the West, must answer for every madman who can recite a verse from the Koran. This is casuistry, best dispatched by William F. Buckley, Jr. sixteen years ago when he challenged a European dignitary's imputation of crimes of South American missionaries to Christianity by asking "which of the Ten Commandments was responsible."
Accordingly, the second problem is in application. We can prove that not all Muslims, not even a sizable minority, are terrorists or religious enforcers. But McCarthy implies that the Gaza kidnappers are representative enough of Islam to render Muslims accountable. There are two permutations: a) most Muslims are bad Muslims, because they do not kidnap or murder or forcibly convert; or b) as figured above, heresy is not inherently or practically excommunicative. Apologists for thuggery are without an excuse, and all other parties should condemn them; but it is hard to understand how an average Muslim is culpable, and it is nearly impossible for McCarthy to have implied anything else. And still unresolved is how one is victorious in a religious war. Iniquity does not require the misappropriation of a covenant with God, and we do well to remember that the denial of God, cardinal to the Soviet state, was contemporarily embraced — just prior to the rise of virulent modern interpretations of Islam — by most of the Arab world.