There are so many left-footed and left-handed little outrages
packed into the stock phrase now used to describe our blessed
terror-plot tipster (Pakistani, I think) that one has to crack open
a beer to properly take, well, stock.
Indeed we should all be heaping praise and benedictions upon the
person who saw fit to save, as it happens, hundreds of innocent
lives from rending immolation above the deep-water Atlantic Ocean
this August 16th. But this person has been dubbed by a battery of
major news outlets, in typical psittacine fashion,
"a worried member of the Muslim community."
It is not, we are to understand, quite right to identify our
helpful fellow man or woman simply, for informational purposes, as
an adherent of Islam -- that is, as an individual. It is newsworthy
that the person is Muslim, yes -- but it is newspeak that the
person is constituented into a Representative of Islam,
incomprehensible outside the context of a supposed "Muslim
community," which makes almost as much sense as lumping Howard Dean
and Pat Robertson in a presumptive "Christian community," or indeed
Jurgen Habermas and David Irving in a so-called "European
community."
Amartya Sen has written nicely on the problems wrapped up in
carving the world up according to religions, and one of those
problems is that fools term individuals primarily as things that
make up groups which have ways of seeing the world that aren't
yours. You are then supposed to support their right to see the
world in that manner because you have been disentitled to disprove,
or even disapprove of, it.
Well from time to time a person comes along from one religion or
another for whom mass murder, as well as the fearsome probability
of mass murder, is too much to bear under any pretext or on behalf
of any community. That scores of Britons and, by implication,
millions of the rest of us, have lives, limbs, and livelihoods to
look forward to once again seems to me to score one for sane
individuals first -- and against insane communities second.
topics:
Religion, Islam, Pakistan
About the Author
James Poulos is a doctoral student at Georgetown and the former Political Editor of Culture11. His writing has been published by The American Conservative, The National Interest, The New Atlantis, Partnership for a Secure America, and The Weekly Standard. In addition to AmSpecBlog, he has blogged at The American Scene, Doublethink, and Postmodern Conservative, which he founded. With degrees in political science and law from Duke and USC, he is currently at work on a dissertation about life after Napoleon. In his spare time he anti-blogs at Pish Tosh.
