I think talk of culture is not very useful. Where does one begin and where does it end? If they are separate, what does it mean people from one culture intact with another? How granular should it be? Are art-loving liberals living in upper Manhattan a separate culture? — Benkei

This is a very clear-cut case, with clear political, social and cultural implications. The Amnesty International page I cited above reproduces the quotation that Ahok was jailed for two years for:

“So it can be that in your subconscious that you, ladies and gentlemen, you can’t vote for me because you’ve been lied to, with Surat Almaidah 51 and the like. That’s your right. If you feel you can’t vote for me because you fear you’ll go to hell, because you’ve been lied to, no worries. That’s your personal call.”

Jailed, for two years.

The thread is about 'separation of church and state' and the observation that Islam doesn't really recognise that separation And thiis case is a textbook illustration. If that offends your liberal sensibilities because it singles out Islam, then so be it.

The Amnesty International page I cited above reproduces the quotation that Ahok was jailed for two years for: — Wayfarer

and the Amnesty page does not mention 'Islamic Culture'. Why not try to learn from the example of an organisation led by very wise and compassionate people?

right, I get it.

The thread is about 'separation of church and state' and the observation that Islam doesn't really recognise that separation And thiis case is a textbook illustration. If that offends your liberal sensibilities because it singles out Islam, then so be it. — Wayfarer

First, there are two problems. The issue that certain countries do not have a separation of religion and state and the issue of blasphemy (and apostasy) laws.

The reality is that some Muslim majority countries are secular and do not have blasphemy or apostasy laws and some do. I can't distill a common position on what Islamic culture is exactly on this point. I don't see how you can especially not by raising the Indonesian example to a standard.

Fun fact; until 2014 the Netherlands had a blasphemy law in its criminal code.

The reality is that some Muslim majority countries are secular and do not have blasphemy or apostasy laws — Benkei

Which are those?

Really? You went into this discussion with a clear position without knowing what you're talking about? :-O

A group simply needs a unique style of pottery to be considered a culture by scholars. Is there an identifiable Islamic artistic style? Yes. It obviously has Persian roots, but it's a reflection of the aversion to iconography in Islam. Instead of "There is no Islamic culture"

How about: "What do you mean by Islamic culture, Wayfarer?"

(Y)

Not to mention religion and language. Of course, these are not universal among Muslims--the Arabic language didn't take over in, for example, Iran or Indonesia, and there are deep religious divisions--and it might be better to say there are several Islamic cultures. But that doesn't mean it's always inappropriate to refer to "Islamic culture" as such, because some cultural dimensions, such as religious interpretations and ideologies (and pottery), can spread very quickly beyond the original source ethnicity, nationality, language, etc., and considering that this happens with Islam primarily among Muslims (obviously), it's indispensable to be able to refer to an Islamic culture in general. A relevant example is the ultra-conservative Salafist movement, which has been influential far beyond Egypt and Saudi Arabia. There are trends in religious interpretation that can be seen across Islamic cultures (plural), thus allowing us to refer to a single Islamic culture, insofar as the dimensions of religion and ideology are considered important aspects of a culture.

I take andrewk to be saying that you have to be careful about making claims about all Muslims, which is right, but that doesn't mean there are not trends, e.g., towards conservatism, that can be identified and which cut across other cultural dimensions. To say things about Islamic culture is not necessarily to make sweeping claims about all Muslims. andrewk and Benkei are probably sensitive to those times when such terms as "Islamic culture" are used to make sweeping claims about all Muslims.

So, to get back to the point: against andrewk's first post in this discussion, it may be quite legitimate to say that Islam is currently theocratic, i.e., that theocratic tendencies are pronounced, though I wouldn't go so far as to say this is essential to Islam, notwithstanding its theological support.

@Benkei The fact that cultures might intersect or contain each other doesn't matter. The relevant granularity depends on what you're interested in. In this case, that's religion, so it's surely then appropriate to speak of Islamic culture, because there are few things more cultural than religion. But it is complicated. The big French survey from a few years ago showed that millions of French people (mostly of North African descent) identify as Muslims but also as secular and non-observant. However, I think this backs up my basic point.

Incidentally, one very broad but interesting way to see what's happening in Islam is not merely as a reaction to Western secularism--several Muslim-majority societies accommodated those changes, even if they've since been reversed--and not as a reaction to Western military interference, but as a competition for moral and religious authority, for the leadership of Islam, being fought between Sunni and Shia Islam. One can see how this would generate a kind of arms race of conservatism.

The fact that cultures might intersect or contain each other doesn't matter. The relevant granularity depends on what you're interested in. In this case, that's religion, so it's surely then appropriate to speak of Islamic culture, because there are few things more cultural than religion. But it is complicated. The big French survey from a few years ago showed that millions of French people (mostly of North African descent) identify as Muslims but also as secular and non-observant. However, I think this backs up my basic point. — jamalrob

It does matter because it makes clear cultures are not monolithic structures and therefore aren't useful in a discussion about blasphemy laws as these vary country from country. I'm this case it goes further as that problem is subsumed under the umbrella of secularism (incorrectly) then it becomes a problem of Islamic culture, whatever that is - it appeared as short hand for all Muslims, considering "Islam is theocratic" (as opposed to Islamist interpretation of the Qur'an). Details matter because we otherwise get statements that are too easily waylaid by the existence of facts (such as Muslim majority countries with secularism even if that is deteriorating).

I wasn't suggesting dropping the term because I don't agree with the criticism where it concerns certain Indonesian, Islamic, political parties but to get to statements that are verifiable and true. I'm proposing to be more precise and it has nothing to do with my sensibilities.

Second, there are Islamic religions (plural) just as we have Christian religions that have such significant differences that to brush over them also leads to statements becoming meaningless in their generality because they only concern a subset.

To your last point, the rush for social conservatism isn't limited to Muslim majority countries, so why do the Netherlands, France (historically high numbers for Le Pen) and UK have the same happening?

When I said it didn't matter, it was in the context of the rest of my post and of the point at issue. I meant that the fact there are intersecting cultures does not go against the point that we can legitimately speak of Islamic culture--obviously, when it's accurate to do so.

Ugh, please. This is as much to do with Indonesian politics as it has to do with religion, and any analysis that calls this a 'textbook case' of how Islam 'intrinsically' doesn't respect the separation of Church and State is talking out of their butt. If anything, Indonesia has been a 'textbook case' of how Islam has not made itself overwhelmingly felt in the public sphere, and a testament to it's compatibility with democracy. This is almost everywhere widely recognized. This has recently begun to change however, because certain politicians - piggybacking off a worldwide tend toward the politicization of Islam - have been trying to stoke religious fervour in order to garner votes. The reason the Ahok case has been such a big deal - apart from the fact that Ahok himself was actually very popular and even tipped to become president himself one way - was that this has been a litmus test for just how successful that swing toward the religious hard-line has become.

It is telling that the decision is hardly uncontroversial, and that many Indonesians - alot of them Muslim - have been out in protest of the sentence. The issue is outrightly political too, insofar as Ahok has been a close ally of the current president, Jokowi, and the sentence is a political blow for him, and a victory for his opponents. Any analysis of the Ahok case that doesn't take into account Indonesian politics and sees it as a matter of what is 'intrinsic to Islam' is full of shit. Indonesia still remains the one the world's biggest secular democracies, and it's hard-line Islam is one among a myriad of political forces at work in the country. Trying to use this case to demonstrate that Islam - as if some abstract entity - has some 'intrinsic' inability to separate church and state is not only blind to the facts - that Indonesia has been, for quite some time, a model of exactly that - but also operates with a shitty religious sociology that thinks it can talk about it in the abstract without taking into account politics and social conditions. Textbook my ass.

The big French survey from a few years ago showed that millions of French people (mostly of North African descent) identify as Muslims but also as secular and non-observant. However, I think this backs up my basic point. — jamalrob

Interestingly, this tend continued in the recent French election. Olivier Roy - the single best commentator on these issues for more than two decades now - wrote a cool little piece recently showing that in fact, Muslims in France largely voted not along religious lines - unlike Catholics, who, by contrast, mostly voted Catholic. Importantly, the reasons have to do not with anything 'intrinsic to Islam' but are due to - as half-decent analysis would recognize - sociological reasons, owing to economic and cultural status. Here's the article: http://www.boundary2.org/2017/05/olivier-roy-french-elections-catholics-vote-catholic-muslims-vote-secular/

Incidentally, Roy's books are the best resources in trying to understand what the deal is when it comes to Islam and politics. Time and time again he has shown that political Islam is overwhelmingly a response to modern and local socio-political conditions, and that the specific shapes it has taken on - different in the many countries where it has appeared - have always been in response to the particular 'on the ground' conditions, as it were. Over and over again he has shown that trying to isolate a political stance or even a stance with respect to the state that is 'intrinsic to Islam' is not simply naive but dangerously so. He put it very nicely in the closing to his Secularism Confronts Islam: "The problem is not Islam but religion or, rather, the contemporary forms of the revival of religion."

So with respect to the question of 'Islamic culture', it'd be more correct to say that there are Islamic cultures, each of which is shaped locally and historically, and in response to the social and political forces at play in any one frame of analysis. The naivety of those who think they can talk about 'Islam' in the abstract - as if divorced form the historical and social conditions in which it is practised - is just insane to me. Yet it dominates the media discourse and if infects, like a virus, discussions like these.

Yes. Good point.

You went into this discussion with a clear position without knowing what you're talking about? :-O — Benkei

The thread is about a general issue, in reference to a specific case, which has attracted worldwide media coverage.

You said

The reality is that some Muslim majority countries are secular and do not have blasphemy or apostasy laws — Benkei

Which are they? //edit// there's a list of secular Islamic states provided here, although Indonesia is on that list, and it clearly does have blasphemy laws.

it appeared as short hand for all Muslims, considering "Islam is theocratic" — Benkei

It is true that Islam, generally, doesn't recognise the distinction of church and state, or the distinction between secular and religious law. Maybe they are correct in that; maybe the liberal notion of separation of powers is corrupt, and maybe Western liberalism is degenerate, but that is not at issue in this case.

This is as much to do with Indonesian politics as it has to do with religion, and any analysis that calls this a 'textbook case' of how Islam 'intrinsically' doesn't respect the separation of Church and State is talking out of their butt. — StreetlightX

If you deny the theocratic tendencies in Islam then so are you. It is a fact that Islam doesn't recognise the separation of Church and State. To say that doesn't characterise 'all Muslims' as anything - but in this case, Islamic hard-liners have appealed to that aspect of Islam, to engineer an outcome which has ramifications both political and cultural. Of course it is true that many Indonesian Muslims are appalled by the outcome and have protested against it.

It is a fact that Islam doesn't recognise the separation of Church and State — Wayfarer

Yeah, a 'fact" that, y'know, facts speak out against. As in, you are literally 100% wrong about this. Put it this way dude, there are literally more than half a billion Muslims in the world who live, eat, sleep, and breathe in largely secular nation-states. You are half a billion reasons wrong. 'Islam', like any other religion, is a human phenomenon - it does not exist in some pie-in-the-sky realm or live by the fantasies of some book: it is a diverse sociological entity subject to the forces of history, economy and culture, like anything else. But don't take my word for it, here is Roy, arguing against the utter naivety of anything who think 'Islam' can be in any way properly analysed outside of these factors:

"It strikes me as intellectually impudent and historically misguided to discuss the relationships between Islam and politics as if 'there were one Islam, timeless and eternal ... Not that I wish to deny fourteen centuries of remarkable permanence in dogma, religious practice, and world vision. But concrete political practices during that time have been numerous and complex, and Muslim societies have been sociologically diverse. We often forget as well that there is a broad range of opinion among Muslim intellectuals as to the correct political and social implications of the Quranic message. Western Orientalists, however, tend either to cut through the debate by deciding for the Muslims what the Quran means or to accept the point of view of a particular Islamic school while ignoring all others.

...To reduce all the problems of the contemporary Muslim world-from the legitimacy of existing states to the integration of immigrant workers-to the residual effects of Islamic culture seems to me tautological, in that by imposing the grid of a culturalist reading upon the modern Middle East, we end up seeing as reality whatever was predetermined by the grid, notably with regard to what I call the "Islamic political imagination," to be found in generic statements such as "In Islam, there is no separation between politics and religion." But it is never directly explanatory and in fact conceals all that is rupture and history: the importation of new types of states, the birth of new social classes, and the advent of contemporary ideologies." (Roy, The Failure of Political Islam).

Finally, even if you are granted the analytically broken idea that 'Islam' is an entity that functions in a complete vacuum of history and society, your 'generic statement', as Roy puts it, that there is no separation between politics and religion in Islam is entirely contestable not merely at the level of historical and sociological fact (where, y'know, Islam and the state have everywhere been separate, in all sorts of countries, in all sorts of times), but at the level of the 'religion' alone. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im for instance, has made exactly this argument in his Islam and the Secular State:

"Islam is the religion of human beings who believe in it, while the state signifies the continuity of institutions like the judiciary and administrative agencies. This view is fundamentally Islamic, because it insists on the religious neutrality of the state as a necessary condition for Muslims to comply with their religious obligations. Religious compliance must be completely voluntary according to personal pious intention (niyah), which is necessarily invalidated by coercive enforcement of those obligations. In fact, coercive enforcement promotes hypocrisy (nifaq), which is categorically and repeatedly condemned by the Quran .... Sharia principles by their nature and function defy any possibility of enforcement by the state, claiming to enforce Sharia principles as state law is a logical contradiction that cannot be rectified through repeated efforts under any conditions."

An-Na'im's takes the whole book to make the argument, and it is but one of course, and there are those who disagree with him. But he is not alone: "From a theoretical point of view, Ali Abd al-Raziq, for instance, conclusively demonstrated the validity of this premise from a traditional Islamic perspective more than eighty years ago... In the 1930s, Rashid Ridda strongly affirmed in al-Manar that Sharia cannot be codified as state law." This, coupled with "the fact that the state is a political and not a religious institution is the historical experience and current reality of Islamic societies" speaks overwhelmingly against any straightforward claim that "there is no separation of Church and State in Islam". At the very least, it is anything but something that can be claimed as some kind of incontestable 'fact'. Note too that I didn't say anything about you being wrong "on the grounds of prejudice and racism", but it's awfully curious that you find yourself forced yourself to use those words nonetheless, no?

'Islam', like any other religion, is a human phenomenon — StreetlightX

You know that no Muslim would agree with that, right? But that doesn't matter, because Islam is what Western liberalism says it is, correct?

No because Islam is what is fucking practiced out there in the world you dolt.

It's typical, when debating with teenagers, no matter how apparently articulate and well-read, that they end up resorting to swearing.

Yeah, because your two rhetorical questions were in any way an adequate response to my post. Trust me, I replied in kind.

Yeah, a 'fact" that, y'know, facts speak out against. As in, you are literally 100% wrong about this. Put it this way dude, there are literally more than half a billion Muslims in the world who live, eat, sleep, and breathe in largely secular nation-states. You are half a billion reasons wrong. — StreetlightX

But most of those five hundred million don't support secularism, they would institute theocracy if they had their way. Most religious people want theocracy, the Mussulmans are no different.

The particular issue that is the subject of this thread, is exactly about the question of the 'separation of powers'. The remark that was made, which triggered the blasphemy trial, was in response to those who were saying that 'the Koran says that no Muslim ought to be governed by a non-muslim'. Ahok responded by suggesting that people ought to be guided by their conscience - and that is what has lead to him being jailed on blasphemy charges.

Cite your claim.

Yes and?

http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2013/04/gsi2-overview-1.png

More than half (51%) of U.S. Muslims polled also believe either that they should have the choice of American or shariah courts, or that they should have their own tribunals to apply shariah. Only 39% of those polled said that Muslims in the U.S. should be subject to American courts. — Center for Security Policy

Most religious people want theocracy — Sivad

This claim needs some elaboration and corroboration.

Certainly there are religious people who hanker after theocracy and having priests of one kind or another running their lives; but there are a lot of religious people who most decidedly do not desire having theocrats in charge.

I don't know how the numbers stack up.

I don't know how the numbers stack up. — Bitter Crank

I don't either really, but take Evangelicals for instance, it's pretty clear that a good many of them want something close to theocracy if not theocracy proper.

That wasn't your claim. Moreover, Sharia is simply Muslim jurisprudence: the exact articulation between that jurisprudence and the state is complex and contested. And this is to say nothing about the clear partisan hack site that is the 'Centre for Security Policy'.

Why doesn't that support the claim and how is Muslim jurisprudence not theocracy?