Multicultural Islam or multicultural anything non-Western: Do not hold your breath. I was in Los Angeles for a day–and by the time I get back the U.S. has deployed armed services people to an astounding number of locations around the world to handle (or deter) the multiplying protests and attacks in the wake of one of the dumbest films ever made that resulted in the death of four Americans in Libya last week. According to the French news agency AFP, the number of venues where violence has already occurred or is expected to occur as of late Saturday GMT is a whopping eighteen (18).
The offending movie–a very bad one from what I can tell from the trailer–was trotted out month after it was accessible by one manipulative anti-Western Egypt-based “tele-Islamist”, and full-time asshole. So aren’t some of these energies born of a pretext to wage war on the West and gain pawns to carry the ball? Sure they are. But many more Muslims genuinely deeply believe that “insulting” Islam deserves swift punishment. It is the way they think and feel. And most are not evil humans.
Listen up: Arab Spring and the new “democracies” now cropping up in the non-Western world does not mean–and may never mean–that underlying cultures that struggle with building new forms of government and societies are going to “get” or embrace Anglo-Saxon notions of dissent, freedom of the press or the First Amendment. It does not mean that they will buy into these principles or even appreciate or tolerate it in Westerners. For years, decades–or even centuries. Those states have not yet been able to reconcile a new form of government with religions that have old, sometimes very old, nuances and rules. In the meantime, what solution? What approach? I think it’s this: get our heads out of our wazoos and realize, in all our dealings with non-Westerners, that we are wired very differently than them and that they are not “wrong” or evil. They are fundamentally different. And also take to our hearts and heads what one Western 12-step program–dumbly but wisely–likes to say about time. It is simply that “time takes time”.