Dark Lords, Muggles and Islam: Harry Potter and Mark Steyn’s “The Future Belongs to Islam” July 22, 2008
Posted by thomas in : Commentary , trackback Over here they transcend chaos and discuss freedom of speech and Mark Steyn’s tussles with politically correct Canadian bureacratic machinery. I’ve weighed in with some hasty and poorly-developed thoughts of my own, and for the most part feel largely ignorant and ill-equipped to provide much of a contribution to the discussion of free speech and the borders of the public square. So, feeling a bit self-concious and uncertain of myself I retreated into the land of children’s fiction and finished reading the final (immensely popular and successful) Harry Potter book, which I soon realized provided some valuable insight for interpreting and critiquing Mark Steyn’s article “The Future Belongs to Islam” (an excerpt from his book America Alone, which unfortunately I have not read as I was busy reading Harry Potter instead, but I am assuming that the argument advanced in the article is continued in the book).Outside the human rights circus that accompanied its publication in Canada I found Steyn’s article intriguing, funny and, at least in its characterization of Muslims and their relationship to Western Europe and North America, wrong. In the midst of the hubbub and drama of the recent human rights tribunal hearing it might be tempting to glorify the article based on its embattled status (yet another example of how Canadian Islamic Congress really shot themselves in the foot with their approach), and so outside the controversial context surrounding the article’s publication and reception I want to deal more directly with the actual content of what was written…in 2006. (Insert embarrassed cough here). So, I’m a little late with my input, and everything I say has probably already been said and said better, but at least my input includes Harry Potter references…
I just finished the final Harry Potter book, and if you’re unfamiliar with the series (ie. you’ve spent the past few years wandering in the Gobi desert, drinking yak milk, counting grains of sand) the main character is a young orphan, lonely and abused, who discovers he is a wizard, and not only a wizard, but a famous wizard who (through his parents’ loving sacrifice) caused the defeat of a powerful-evil-fascist-terrorist sort of wizard named Voldemort. Voldemort has a group of followers called “Death-Eaters” who advance a propaganda of Pureblood (meaning only wizard ancestry) superiority over Mudbloods (a pejorative term referring to the descendants of non-wizards and/or the products of intermarriage) and Muggles (or regular human beings who generally don’t wear cloaks, play high altitude games on brooms or receive invitations to visit Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and participate in a harrowing yet ultimately satisfying quest to defeat evil, attain meaning and grow in self-knowledge). Voldemort’s ultimate goal is the elimination of impurity in the wizarding society and the establishment of himself as the eternal master of a pureblooded wizarding overclass and the books largely chronicle Harry Potter’s adventures as he grows and matures and does battle with the “Dark Lord.”
Now, suppose that you are a Muggle (it shouldn’t take much imagination), and you get word of these Death-Eaters, intent on purification of their own community, power and world domination through violence; the results of their attacks start to make the evening news. Voldemort sends videotapes to major network news stations warning Muggles to submit to the wizarding community or be destroyed and bootlegged videos of young Death-Eaters torturing kittens and swinging on jungle gyms as part of their training exercises appear on YouTube. Worst of all, it appears as though these wizards have infiltrated our everyday communities, perhaps have been there for years, and they live and move among us undercover, identified only by their sometimes strange dress, customs and language. Generally most of the Muggle folks didn’t know much about the wizarding community before Voldemort came on the scene and started killing people and being all threatening and snake-like, and so as a result Voldemort comes to define, in the minds of many Muggles, the primary characteristics of the wizarding community as a whole. There are rumors of groups that oppose the violent purging and domination Voldemort advocates, but by most accounts the group is largely silent, weak and probably aren’t real wizards anyway as wizards who love Muggles or come from Muggle ancestry are not really true to their wizarding heritage (according to Voldemort anyway, whose perspective and exploits are continuously recounted through the Muggle media). That doesn’t sound similar to any real-world circumstances…does it?
Voldemort and Osama Bin Laden: just think how much more frightening Osama could be with that nose and those teeth…and the ability to fly.
Now what sort of commentary might be produced if it was discovered that wizard birth rates vastly outstripped Muggle birthrates in the villages they shared? (Note: Muggle-wizard demography is not discussed in the books). What if a Death-Eater living in Norway (not traditionally a wizard stronghold) released a statement describing with glee (and the unfortunate metaphor of mosquitoes) how Muggles do not need to be overcome with violence when wizards can simply outbreed them and dominate through sheer numbers?
Now, the real question here is: why haven’t you already soiled your Muggle-loving-pants? (In your imagination of course, where Voldemort is declaring open war on Muggles and a wizarding population is booming in English cities and French suburbs everywhere). Why doesn’t a potential wizarding population boom leave you quaking in fear? Oh. Right. That Harry Potter guy and all his friends. You’re not frightened because you’ve read the books and do not automatically equate “wizard” with”Death-Eater.” It may make you a little uneasy when you realize that there will be some changes to the world you currently know and thrive in but when you remember that Neville Longbottom’s grandmother exists it is much harder to consistently feed fears that the person shuffling on to your plane wearing robes and a pointy hat (or a shalwar-kamizeand a full beard) is planning to steer you all into a tall building. I don’t want to say that there are not very real threats to be dealt with (I mean look at that picture up there, it’s nasty), but the number of babies being pumped out seems like it might be down the little ways down the list in terms of threats since they don’t all come out looking and acting like Voldemortand the Death Eaters.
Cedric Diggory: a wizard who, unlike Voldemort, is popular with the ladies, brushes his teeth, and does not hate regular human beings and seek their destruction.
The reason rapid wizard population growth isn’t all that frightening in our imaginary scenario is at least in part because an examination that looks past the spectre of the Dark Lord spouting hatred on the evening news reveals the complexity and intricacy of wizarding society, and the variety of views and positions on Muggles from hatred to indifference to appreciation. While Death-Eaters offer one vision of wizarding-Muggle relations it by no means is applicable to the whole of wizard society, and so it’s not necessary to assume that all wizard babies will grow into Death-Eaters, and in fact it seems extremely unlikely given that Death-Eaters are a minority in the community and in general alienate other wizards through their indiscriminate killing and violence (Lawrence Wright talks about this - and by “this” I mean radical Islam, not Death-Eater wizards - in both his book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, which provides what is widely regarded by commentators on both the left and right as the best introduction to the history and background of the movement, and in this recent article, about a call to end terrorist violence from a most unlikely source).
In “The Future Belongs to Islam” Mark Steyn describes demography as the most basic root cause for societal change: “A people that won’t multiply can’t go forth or go anywhere. Those who do will shape the age we live in.” And I would suggest that an argument from population growth rates is very impressive, especially when discussing competing forms of bacteria in a petri dish. The petri dish environment doesn’t change, the character of the bacteria itself does not change, and it all comes down to brute mathematical inevitability and multiplication rates. It seems part of the fear embodied by those who envision a growing “Eurabia” or the establishment of a Muslim caliphate in the Middle East as the most likely outcome of our current cultural and political situation (whether they be extremist Muslims or fearful westerners), is that the petri dish is changing and their view of the world is quickly becoming obsolete. They struggle with a real world composed of thinking, communicating, relational human beings in widely varying and rapidly changing cultural contexts that do not fit well into a petri dish model - despite the comfort and certainty such a model provides for those defining the characters and conditions.
And Steyn paints a very bleak view of the characters and conditions. He admits that not all Muslims are terrorists or support terrorists, but many are happy to play a “good cop” role in an Islamic “good cop/bad cop” routine whose end goal is the imposition of sharia law on Western civilization. And, even if the growing Muslim population in Western European countries does not actively support terrorism “at the very minimum this fast moving demographic transformation provides a huge comfort zone for the jihad to move around in.” (Eating naan and hummus has the potential to make terrorists comfortable. Stop it.) In Steyn’sview, not all Muslims support terrorism (although many do), or are sympathetic to its goals (although once again many are), but there are certainly none that oppose it (or at least none worth mentioning in the Macleans article). By introducing this growing mass of extremists, implicit supporters and generally apathetic immigrants into a crumbling European civilization that is struggling with “civilizational confidence” and fatigue the consequences are obvious, inevitable and chilling.
In Steyn’s world where ”a good 90 percent of everything is about demography”, and the best we can expect from western Muslim populations is their unwitting provision of a “comfort zone” for the launching of radical Islamist terrorism, and the best we can expect from everyone else is to choke to death on social welfare dollars with robots at our bedsides while violent immigrant youth sack our cities - we really can soil our Muggle-loving-pants. But, why am I not quaking in fear? Why do I think Steyn’s vision of the world just doesn’t ring true?
For one thing, we have heard this one before: here come the Papists! here come the Jews! here come the Chinese! We’re going to be overrun! They’ve infiltrated our government! They’ve infiltrated our banking system! Alarmist demographic predictions of doom do not have a very strong track record. And why is that? Well, I would argue it is because we don’t live in a petri dish and we lack the static character of multiplying bacteria. These visions tend to be fueled by fear and the application of broad, inflexible categorical definitions that crumble when the distance between cultural groups is reduced. When we encounter new cultural contexts it demands change, both conscious and unconscious. When surrounded by neighbors and neighboring communities that are different than our own it requires adjustment, on all sides, and while adjustment does not necessarily lead to conversion it is an adjustment none the less. Protestants and Catholics from 19th and early 20th century Boston would probably find the current post Vatican II state of affairs disturbing, and Jack London would likewise possibly be disturbed by the number and variety of Chinese restaurants in Vancouver, but I count that as a cultural gain and not a loss. A host country and civilization adjusts to its newcomers even as they adjust to it.
In relation to Muslim immigration I’m unsure as to why this could not continue to be the case. One of the (many) places my Harry Potter metaphor breaks down is that there is no choice as to whether you will become a wizard or a Muggle, that’s simply the way you are born. But in the pluralistic western religious-cultural arena there is also a choice to become something completely different than what you have always been. And while Islam may seem to provide such a strong sense of identity that conversion to other views or abandonment of that particular system of belief seems entirely unthinkable from our current perspective where the majority of Muslims still live in repressive, corrupt, fractured regimes in developing countries with limited economic prospects, it is worth remembering that the possibility of large chunks of the western European population abandoning Christianity also seemed impossible at one time (or, for that matter, huge numbers of Chinese, Africans and South Americans embracing it in more numbers and with more fervor and passion than their western counterparts).
Charles Taylor in his massive (and masterful) work, A Secular Age, describes our current situation in the west as a “spiritual super nova, a kind of galloping pluralism on the spiritual plane” (p. 300, if you have a copy and would like to cross reference). Taylor describes our current religious and spiritual situation as one where we are confronted with a plurality of choices for belief and unbelief, and these choices are no longer as connected as they once were to various national, family, cultural bonds - we are no longer embedded so firmly in our communities of belief as we once were. This diversity and abundance of choice is more than simply coexisting in a society with many different faiths, I think Taylor explains it well (p. 304 if you’re interested):
Pluralism is certainly an important part of the answer, how things are different today. When everybody believes, questions don’t as easily arise. But we have to say that pluralism in the sense meant here doesn’t just mean the co-existence of many faiths in the same society, or the same city. Because we have often seen this in pre-modern contexts, or in other parts of the world, with relatively little fragilizing consequences.
The fact is that this kind of multiplicity of faiths has little effect as long as it is neutralized by the sense that being like them is not really an option for me. As long as the alternative is strange and other, perhaps despised…so that becoming that isn’t really conceivable for me, so long will their difference not undermine my embedding in my own faith.
This changes through increased contact…the other becomes more and more like me, in everything else but faith: same activities, professions, opinions, tastes etc. Then the issue posed by difference becomes more insistent: why my way and not hers? There is no difference left to make the shift preposterous or unimaginable.
Now, the results of living in the situation described here by Taylor are not all positive. This discussion of the nova effect and the increasing fragilization of faith comes in the chapter entitled “The Malaises of Modernity,” which describes the difficulty those of us living in this context have in finding meaning. Our systems of belief are rendered increasingly fragile and we experience what Taylor describes as a “malaise”, a flatness, a dissatisfaction and frustration with a world that fails to provide transcendent meaning. The “spiritual super nova” Taylor describes presents significant challenges to believers of all confessions. I think Steyn is trying to describe some aspects of this sense with his description of “civilizational fatigue” - a sense that we no longer aspire to greatness or possess a strong sense of identity that extends beyond ourselves in some way - to a nation, faith community or transcendent God.
And while the negative aspects of our current religious situation (for a believer anyway) are all too apparent we shouldn’t ignore the potential positives that arise out of this current situation, especially with respect to successful intercultural and interreligious relations in building functioning, flourishing communities and limiting prejudice and abuse. While old authoritarian religious structures flounder (such as the state churches of Western Europe) rather than simply lament the decline of the west it is worth recognizing the development of new structures and religious communities that flourish in this new context that defy the old conventions (like Nigerian immigrants establishing massive Pentecostal churches in the middle of Ukraine for instance). The current secular context erodes and severely challenges certain elements of faith and belief while feeding the desire for others. One of Taylor’s arguments throughout the book is that the onset of our current “secular age” has entailed not only the decline of traditional belief but also the development of new religious forms and desires for spiritual understanding. It seems to me as there is no doubt that the increasing influence and relevance of Islam in the western context will change (and is changing) the nature of our current religious, political and cultural context, but I see no reason not to think that our current religious, political and cultural context will also change and adjust the nature of the Islam that operates within it.
I suppose the other reason that Steyn’s vision of rapidly growing immigrant communities does not leave me trembling with fear is because I spent my childhood in a country that was demographically 98% Muslim, a hotbed of various forms of extremist Islam, and also home to millions of people seeking any chance they could to escape corruption, oppression and limited social and economic opportunity to develop a new life. I realize that such evidence that points to friendships with Muslims, or the desire of ordinary men and women for basic literacy and health education is entirely anecdotal, but I do not respond well to the broad stripes with which the media often paints Muslim populations (as the size of this post indicates). While Steyn spends a good chunk of his article describing the angry young men living in alienation in the suburbs, he fails to spend even a sentence exploring the possible mindset of a Muslim woman living in those same suburbs. Is it possible to imagine that in a context of greater freedom and legal protection that a young Muslim woman would seek to expand that freedom rather than seek its destruction? Is it really that bizarre to think that some immigrants arrive seeking better economic opportunities, an escape from corruption, an escape from abuse and that when granted that opportunity they will be unwilling to protect and defend it against those who seek to take it away through violence? I don’t believe such thoughts are based in wildly unrealistic optimism. If there is real oppression, sexual, economic, racial - and the opportunity comes to rise above it seems to me that at least some will fight for it.
If we really are suffering from a civilizational fatigue that makes it impossible for us to stand up to oppression then perhaps rather than villainize our immigrant populations as willing participants in a good cop/bad cop routine for the imposition of fundamentalist Islamic law or confine them to ghettos at the edge of our cities and societies with limited opportunities for police intervention, intercultural exchange and economic and educational advancement we should work harder to provide space for the voices of those who have no voice. Our failure in regards to the angry and alienated populations of the Parisian suburbs is not a question of civilizational vitality, a failure to impose our cultural and linguistic norms on an immigrant population, it is a problem with a failure to act with justice and mercy - values that are not confined to western civilization. Our problem is not with a lack of a survival instinct (the conditions of the Parisian suburbs, to beat a dead horse, seem to suggest that our survival instinct is alive and well), it is not that we have failed to dig our heels in and establish firm boundaries of Englishness/Dutchness/Germanness, it is that we have failed to give a voice to the voiceless, failed to extend mercy, understanding and opportunity. We do not lack cultural pride, we lack humility (whether that cultural image thrives in Manhattan and Amsterdam or Dallas and Atlanta). What is needed quite beyond the call for cultural dominance/fear is the need to recognize those conflicts which explode the “clash of civilizations” model - the much older clash of the oppressor and oppressed, the exclusion and abuse of the stranger and otherwise marginalized, the use of power to control, dominate and exercise violence against the weak. Of course, I may be straying off track here, but I believe those narratives still have power, and more power for our current cultural context than ones of civilizational decay and cultural dominance. Accusations of naivety will attend any discussion that talks about justice and mercy as though such things actually existed, and while it is easy to embrace such narratives as ideas it is often harder to apply these concepts on the ground. Yet, it seems to me that an attempt to work within such a narrative in reality (rather than what may be an equally naive portrait that purports to be more realistic but still embraces transcendent narratives like “the decline of the west” and the “destruction of our community at the hands of the them“), provides some element of hope, some motivation to explore what is possible rather than simply lamenting the passing of what has already been and will never be again.
Comments»
Thomas, thanks for providing another view to this issue. It’s refreshing, as the claims of Steyn’s article have become lost in the hubbub around the commission.
I agree, particularly with your reference to previous “demographic predictions of doom.” Seems to me we’re headed down an old track, though I defend Steyn’s right to express potentially offensive opinions.