In that context, I absolutely do think you can know whether protest is more locally than globally salient. In fact, that’s the distinction I’m trying very carefully to work in this entry. Some protests in some places are largely about global issues, are even in some very real sense “the clash of civilizations”. Other protests are not–and I think Northern Nigeria is a good example of that. How do I know? Because those protests are part of a deeper history of conflict; they resemble in form and direction protests and riots that have sprung up at times when there is no global issue, no grand provocation to Muslims, about issues that seem to have nothing to do with Islam. The history of northern Nigeria suggests to me that Islam is only one factor among quite a few in producing tension and conflict; the Nigerian state would be, in my view, a far more important source of underlying conflict. It’s not that those protests are without connection to global conflict, but neither are they wholly or even largely explained by such conflict.

2) Any Muslim who takes offense at “imprudent exercise of our freedoms” is not a moderate, and not an ally worth cultivating at the price of our freedom. The very use of the phrase on your part is, to coin a phrase, troubling.

3) It would be troubling if there were no limits on executive power in the United States, regardless of the reason. But of course this is not true, so one need not be troubled.

Like when you write, “what is most objectionable about the cartoons, deep down, is not what they represent about the faith of Muslims but their instantiation of a form of state-society relations that both vested interests and popular consciousness within some Muslim nations find ultimately dubious.”

The rioters, whether they’re egged on by “vested interests” or engaging in some kind of acting-out therapy vis-a-vis their “popular consciousness,” aren’t remotely dubious about the form of state-society relations instantiated by the cartoons. Arson, killings, death warrants–these aren’t the responses of persons who are skeptical, who entertain doubts, who remain unpersuaded of the benefits. The rioters know damn well what they think about a secular state, or, at the very least, they think they know what they think–they reject it utterly.

It would be just as silly and about as useful to say that abortion-clinic bombers are “dubious” about abortion’s “instantiation” of a form of mother-fetus relations, or that the IRA was expressing “doubts” about the partition of Ireland.

Nor, echoing Abiola Lapite’s comments above, does it seem evident that any significant amount of ideologically- and religiously-motivated terror is really local score-settling under a global guise. And even if it were, how would anyone know?

Such nuances in the rioters’ motivations seem to me to be inferred by you, and rather uncharacteristically fuzzily at that. As such, I’m dubious about them (not to worry; I’m too much of a wuss to torch anything).

Finally, color me unconvinced that empathizing with (some/many/pick a number that comports with your worldview) Muslims’ sense of historical humiliation will accomplish much. To turn Mary Catherine Moran’s question back at her, what do we do with that? Make clucking sympathetic noises? Stop being democratic and liberal and call a halt to all technological progress until the rest of the kids have had a chance to catch up? Wear sackcloth and ashes, and send a dozen roses every day promising “we’ll” make it up to “them?” Or (heh) just stop the presses?

All facetiousness aside, I’m pretty sure I know the litany of answers: Israel; Iraq; America’s historical support for corrupt regimes, etc. But Europe, which is relatively untarnished by–at least–Kissinger and W., is also under the gun in a big, and maybe even bigger, way. Isn’t it possible, as Prof. Burke hints and quickly backs away from, that they really, truly hate Western, secular, liberal democracy? That they hate what we know as freedom? Why can’t we ever take them at their word?

It is awful to contemplate violence, even in defense of freedom, but wouldn’t it be worse to lose this precious ground that humanity has struggled so long and so hard to gain? Or is what we’ve inherited really so worthless and illusory that we can shrug and say what’s the difference between one thing and another, between this power structure and that one, between these grand-sounding words (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) and those grand-sounding words (complete surrender of every last human being to Allah’s will as expressed by Sharia law)?

By the way, the negotiation analogy doesn’t quite hold water for me. As you yourself have pointed out numerous times, “Muslims” are not one undifferentiated mass. Why not ignore and/or punish miscreants (at least, for heaven’s sake, don’t reward them with concessions) and deal with those Muslims, of whom there are surely many, who don’t carry around a raging desire to avenge what they perceive as historical injustice and disenfranchisement? Certainly the immigrant Muslims I know don’t seem carry around the enormous hatred of the West evinced by the most radical elements in Muslim-majority nations.

Juan Cole’s injunction to Westerners to try and understand the extent to which many Muslim publics are working out a deeply historical sense of humiliation and ill-treatment is important. Derisively dismissing that structure of feeling as ill-founded, or suggesting that people just get over history, is about as useful as trying to talk about the actual meaning of “idolatry”. Anybody who has ever seriously participated in processes of negotiation knows that actively humiliating someone in such a process, or failing to take feelings of humiliation seriously, is a recipe for failure.

I don’t buy this for a second, and regard it as an ahistorical apologia for abandoning any responsibility to candidly criticize bad ideas for what they are. The fact is that Muslims are not by any means the only peoples in the history of the world to be “humilated” or “ill-treated” by the West, yet they are the group most prone to expressing their resentment at such treatment through violent means. What is more, Muslims aren’t themselves innocents of history who were always acted upon rather than acting: aggressive, expansionist Islam was knocking on the gates of Western Europe as recently as the 17th century, and in Africa militant Islamic imperialism throughout the Sahel was only interrupted at the close of the 19th century by the superior force of British and French imperialism. Indeed, Islamic aggression is going on in many parts of the world at this very moment, in Sudan, in Indonesia, in Thailand, as well as in several other countries countries spanning two of the largest continents, yet where are the routine expressions of threats and violence in response to silly things like articles and cartoons by the peoples on the receiving end of all the humilations and ill-treatment meted out by Muslims in every single country in which they are the majority?

A rioter in Afghanistan may be settling local scores, acting in local frameworks, and some Danish cartoons merely provide a sort of focal point, as did The Satanic Verses in northern Nigeria some years ago.

A radical suggestion: what if that “local score” of which you write in the case of the “Satanic Verses” in Nigeria, just happens to be what those engaging in the score settling actually claimed they were, namely expressing their unwillingness to tolerate anything they consider insulting to their religion? I mean, I was there when this all happened, and if those Muslims who erupted in anger were simply expressing some “local conflict” rather than rage at a perceived “insult” to their religion, one would think I’d have noticed it then …

As hard as it might be to accept, given your sympathy to Juan Cole’s position, sometimes people are indeed driven to fits of barbarism by sincerely held religious beliefs, rather than merely using them as vehicles for other grievances.

It’s a damn shame that you seem so bent on chastizing “superpower triumphalists” for not showing sufficient humility for your tastes that you should now be pretending that the Muslim propensity for violence is either a “fringe” phenomenon, borne of “local conflicts” rather than core religious beliefs or “explainable” by reference to historical “humiliations”, when anyone with the time and interest can easily verify that poll after poll of worldwide Muslim opinion suggests that violent responses to “humiliations” and censorship of critical views is indeed mainstream thinking, that such behavior is endorsed and even mandated by the Koran, the Hadith and the standard methods of interpretation within the main schools of Islamic thought, and that no other religious group in modern times has so consistently betrayed a willingness to engage in intimidation and violence at even the slightest challenge to the supremacy of their creed. Try actually living in a Muslim majority environment for a while and we’ll see how quickly you abandon all these nice-sounding but utterly wrong-headed notions.

Evidence please? For “unachievable, ” “all agree,” and “unrepresentative.” I see no evidence in history or current affairs.

2) I don’t believe any society, including ours, accepted free discourse without force and humiliation; since it was successful in our case, I’m willing to believe it could be successful elsewhere.

3) I’m trying to use the language of this particular thread to make my points.

4) Speaking in generalities can be a useful rhetoric.

5) I am thinking grandly and vaguely of the possibility of the emergence of an Islamic version of a civil society detached from state authority. It just so happens that I don’t think it will happen without violence, whether applied internally or externally.

If you don’t want to dwell on particulars (and who does, when commenting at a weblog?), why not think grandly and vaguely about the possibility of the emergence of an Islamic version of a civil society detached from state authority?

I believe that certain modes of Christianity followed up on the essential Renaissance-Enlightenment humiliation of the claims of religion by *redefining* what was essentially humiliating and what was not; by redefining the essential claims of religion away from claims of supremacy in public discourse, and thus eventually removing the sense of humiliation. For another jargon, they redefined religion to include a deritualized and desacralized public sphere. With Gertrude Himmelfarb and Mark Noll, I do think that a “Scottish” Enlightenment allowed for the development of (the usually tense) harmony between Enlightenment claims and religion, without claiming a necessary “French” disjunction between reason and religion.

But this mode developed as an accommodation to a fundamental challenge by liberal discourse, and it required the acceptance of what would have been taken as humiliation a very few centuries earlier. It was not easy to accept; and it was based on the result of a series of rather bloody wars and civil wars to underpin its political bases.

I think Islam can be made to accept a Scottish Enlightenment–and indeed rather more easily than a French one–but it will still take force and humiliation to make the mainstream of Islam resemble New England Puritans in 1775, if less than it would to make it resemble French Jacobins in 1792.