By Alexander Nachman, November 13th, 2012 
When analyzing politics and society in the Arab and Islamic world, it is admirable and important to break away from a Western-centered analysis. This move is not sufficient though. There is a temptation to continue to fall back on theories and rhetoric that have emanated from the west and have informed exactly that from which one attempts to break away. Furthermore, when discussing public discourse in the Arab world, it is imperative that one addresses the importance of Islam and its continuing vital role in Arab and Middle Eastern politics, despite Western scholarship’s tendency to suggest a historical end that involves the marginalization of religion. I appreciate Professor Challand’s posts in Deliberately Considered and the admirable move of breaking away from Western-centered analysis, but I think his posts suffer from theoretical temptation and an insufficient appreciation of the role of Islam.
It is true that civil-society is more than “NGOs and the developmental approach which imagines that the key to progress is when donors, the UN or rich countries, give aid to boost non-state actors, in particular NGOs, in the ‘developing south’” as Professor Challand asserts in his post “The Counter-Power of Civil Society in the Middle East.” I believe, though, that one must also conceive of civil-society and democratic institutions as more than a source for “collective autonomy” using other than secular slogans in the tradition of Tocqueville and Hegel.
Writing a history of democracy would have to include analysis such as de Tocqueville’s, but we should also remember that de Tocqueville wrote:
Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Quran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power . . .
Read more: Beyond the West: A Critical Response to Professor Challand’s Approach to the Arab Transformations
By Michael Weinman, March 9th, 2012 
These days, as I reflect on the explosive aftereffects of the incineration of copies of the Quran in a US military base in Afghanistan, I find myself re-reading chapters 1-11 of Book Two of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, where he offers his treatment of the passions (the Greek is pathē, from which we get all those “path” terms, like sympathy, empathy, apathy, pathetic, and so on). This “theory of moral sentiments” comes in the context of “a theory of rhetoric”: a reasoned discourse offering analysis and advice concerning the political use of composed speech in situations where persuasion is based on something other than “purely” rational conviction. Central to what Aristotle has to say is that human beings experience anger on those occasions when they: (1) believe that they themselves or something that they hold dear (or, especially, most dear) has been belittled and (2) cherish a wish for revenge. The paradigmatic example is Achilles, who believing himself to have been robbed of his honor (which is what was most dear to him at that time) by Agamemnon, displays his anger precisely by predicting and praying for (and then enlisting the gods’ support for his predictive prayer) the devastation of the Greek army as a punishment to Agamemnon. This is especially exemplary in that, among other things, it shows why what we euphemistically call “collateral damage” is so endemic to “the work of anger.”
The terrible events that have followed the burning of the Qurans by insufficiently sensitive and ill trained personnel, sadly, were entirely predictable in terms of Aristotle’s account. The anger, with its destructive thirst for revenge, that a believer feels in seeing the testament burned unceremoniously as refuse is immediately understandable for someone who has taken the slightest moment to conceive of how a Muslim relates to the sacred word, and how it differs from the way in which a Christian relates to the sacred word. With just the smallest degree of education—precisely the kind of education Aristotle is trying to provide in his Rhetoric—one could see at an instant . . .
Read more: On Anger, “Judeo-Christian” Values and the Quran Burning Controversy
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 24th, 2010 
Why is an Islamic community center dedicated to intercultural and interreligious understanding in any way a desecration to the memory of the victims of the attacks?
Why is the planning of the center provocative or insensitive?
There are problems with facts and truth, as I have reflected upon in my previous posts, but there are also problems with interpretation and evaluation. Given the facts, the community center can only be considered an affront if there is something fundamentally wrong with one of the great world religions. This center is clearly not the work of radical fundamentalists. Its goal is dialogue and understanding. If these are jihadists, all Muslims are. If we publicly speak and act with such interpretation, we are effectively declaring a religious war, playing the game of the religious fanatics.
And isn’t it odd that it is now, 9 years after the attacks of 2001, and not in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks, that a broad fear of Muslims seems to be sweeping the country? So many major political leaders are complicit in the Islamophobia: from those who are stoking the flames, Gingrich and Palin and their media facilitators at Fox and company; to those who fear opposing the hysteria, Harry Reid and the like?
Even President Obama has not been clear about the problem (more about that in a later post). I think that Islamophobia, not Islam, now presents a clear and present danger to American democracy, not only because it compromises our fundamental principles, but also because it challenges our security. See for a report on this issue: U.S. Anti-Islam Protest Seen as Lift for Extremists
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