Calm Down

This morning I sent a friend a short video. No note, no comment, nothing. In it Navīd Wahrāmān, a Pakistani writer, asks whether the Iranian diaspora’s hatred of Islam is justified. Pakistan had Zia-ul-Haq making prayer compulsory in government offices, and Afghanistan has a Taliban he calls less tolerant than the Islamic Republic, and neither diaspora turned on the religion in the same way, so repression does not explain it. Then, in his last eleven seconds, he says we should think of the Iranian diaspora as ‘just not being too bright’, easily duped by Islamophobic propaganda. My friend wrote back with a charge sheet against me for having sent it. I told him to calm down; my arguments, I said, are where I write them. That was a poor answer, and this is a better one.

He then set two conditions and I accept both: that he was criticising the clip and my passing it on, not my work, and that we should stay on the clip and the conversation after it, without going back through the years. Any reasonable person might ask for that, and everything here is written inside it.

His case ran like this. The conclusion was insulting and racialised. Passing something on without a word is itself an act. The disposition being mocked has a history made of executions, exile and forty-seven years of being told that God required it. Therefore, and this is where he ended, do not engage with such people at all. He quoted Mark Twain at me: never argue with stupid people, they will drag you to their level and beat you with experience.

He is right about the ending and I will not wriggle out of it. Not being too bright is a claim about a people’s wits, offered to explain their politics, and nothing in the comparison preceding it licenses the move: a man who shows that repression fails to explain something has not shown what does. It is a bad inference, and a bad argument does not, of course, improve in the mouth of whoever repeats it. I repeated it. Granted.

Now look at what he passed over. The sentence just before the one that offended him says we should not explain away the diaspora’s behaviour as a natural response to repression. That is the argument I have been putting to him for a year. He took eleven seconds of a hundred and six and left the rest alone. The rest is the part that answers him. Prison, the graveside, the flogging and the murder are not an Iranian monopoly, and much of what was done in Pakistan and Afghanistan was done in the name of God too. Hold the suffering roughly constant and the responses still differ. So what explains the difference? Whatever it is, it is not the suffering.

Suffering explains. It does not absolve.

That a disposition has a history tells you how it arrived; it tells you nothing about whether it is right. Once the two collapse there is no telling the injured from the vicious, since both can show you the injury and both are telling the truth. I set this out in an earlier piece and called it a failure of resolution. A category is not an agent. Islam detains nobody; a particular judiciary does.

Two silences

Which brings me to the advice. Never argue with stupid people. It describes nothing I do, as he knows. So what is it asking of me? Silence towards a person and silence about a problem are two different silences. I have kept the first for years and will go on keeping it. I will not keep the second. Offered to a man who has stopped replying, the maxim asks for the second: that the objection dissolve along with the reply, that the thinking stop when the typing stops. I have heard the same shape twice today. Do not argue with them, they will drag you down. Do not look back there, it will only irritate us. He meant both kindly, I am sure, and both take a subject off the table and call the removal prudence.

What we were both taught

I should say where I stand, because the argument makes no sense without it. I come from a tradition in which it is incumbent upon me to stand up and say, without embarrassment or apology, that I am a Muslim. It obliges me to be polemical about nothing. It obliges me to two things only. I do not retreat. I do not bow down to falsehood. None of this is my invention. I was taught it, and so was he, in the same place. He knows the guidance I mean, and it counsels nothing resembling withdrawal: carry the faith openly, speak about it, look first for what you hold in common with the people among whom you live, and when provocation comes, explain, and go on explaining, and never answer in anger. Go back to it. Where is the sentence that tells us to step away? I have looked, and there is none. One line in it I would set beside his third point, said to people who had lost more than anyone here has lost: suffering is no reason to stop working and no reason to stop thinking. He knows the line, and I am not going to gloss it.

There are people who vilify Islam. I am not describing criticism, which any living tradition must be able to take; vilification is a different activity, and both of us know the difference when we see it. What troubles me is that when the vilification is going on, my friend seems comfortable with it and says nothing to clear the air. A thing can be encouraged positively, by joining in, or negatively, by standing beside it and saying nothing, and I have serious difficulty with both, since I do not accept the second is lighter than the first. Silence in the presence of something you could have named is a position, and one that is never asked to defend itself.

This is where his third point does its work, because it is what makes that silence comfortable. If the hostility is excused in advance by the suffering behind it, there is nothing left to object to, and saying nothing stops feeling like a failure of nerve and begins to feel like compassion. That is the exchange I cannot make.

The same guidance binds me, which is why I conceded what I conceded. A good deal of it is about what we pass on, and about checking a source. He was entitled to hold me to that, and he did. Yet it asks something of him as well, and neither of us is free to choose which half applies.

I may still be wrong about how I took the clip, and if he presses it I will listen. He writes to me because he reads what I publish and takes the trouble to object, attention I get from few people. He will read this and be angry with me again, and he will write back, and I will read every word of it. That is most of what I want from anybody.

Photograph: the mihrab and minbar of the Şehzade Mosque, Istanbul, 7 June 2008. Dosseman / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.