Waleed Aly is an infuriatingly talented man.
“Tony Abbott just called for both a Reformation and a revolution “within Islam”. This is, of course, perhaps the most well-worn and ill-informed cliche of Western discourse on Islam – the kind of thing people like to say when they want to sound serious but know almost exactly nothing about Islam, Muslim societies, or indeed the Reformation.”
“Here is our former prime minister, arguing against his very self.
Unless, of course, he isn’t because when it comes to Islam, all the normal rules are suspended. Including, it seems, whatever rules require that the words we use are meant to have meaning.”“So much could be said here. Of how Islam’s own version of the Reformation already occurred in the 18th century. Of how this episode gave birth to Wahhabism, with its disdain for traditional religion and its austere scripturalism. Of how that finally became expressed in the nation state of Saudi Arabia. Of how it combined with the anti-colonial movement of Islamism – self-consciously a reform movement, by the way – to create (eventually) al-Qaeda and through it Islamic State.”“And of how we should hardly be surprised that Islam’s Reformation has turned so bloody and so ugly given that Christianity’s Reformation claimed somewhere between 5 million and 15 million lives in the French Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years’ War alone.”
And then, his sights get turned onto Trump.
“If the problem is an un-Reformed Islam then it follows that un-Reformed Muslims are intrinsically a danger. And if that Reformation has never existed, then it follows that all Muslims (or religious ones, anyway) are un-Reformed. Follow the syllogism and you’ll get to Trump eventually. And that’s where the brand of politics comes into focus. Trump hates Muslims, and clearly trades on it.”
“But he apparently also hates Mexicans and women. Moreover, he hates them all in the most scandalous way, and I suspect that’s the point. Trump is interesting precisely because his politics is all about scandal. He’s transforming rank prejudice into virtue. Any scandal only proves his bona fides. So every criticism becomes just another case of political correctness to which he can respond, as he did this week: “But. I. Don’t. Care.””
Of the both of them, he refers to their ideological and political motivations as “the politics of hairy chests,” and lambasts this modern style of “conservative” politics as being little more than thinly veiled, uncaring, uncompromising macho aggression.
“The politics that (inaccurately) describes itself as conservative has now been reduced to such obsessions. It pretends to preserve and defend a culture, but notice how it never really enacts it. There is always much talk of values such as “decency and tolerance”, but it’s a real struggle to recall exactly how that was practised at crucial moments or under any stress.”
“The Abbott government – and now what we might call the Abbott opposition – was forever hunting enemies. At most it packaged aggression as compassion, but it was always aggression. That is the only mode it has. It has no traditional moral language; nothing that richly evokes concepts like empathy, courage, sacrifice, restraint, forgiveness, forbearance, humility.”
And the beauty of the article – which, in full, is a read to behold, and is well worth your Friday morning attention – is that any response that stands in solidarity behind Abbott, Trump, and their current lines of best fit, is merely one that proves Aly’s point.
