When I read Milbank’s recent essay on Islam, I planned to write a retort, but was quickly beaten to the punch by Adam. In the following days, others have responded in like (courtesy of Roland Boer who, as you might expect, seems to agree with these responses).
Though a full length response seems a bit redundant at this point, I can’t help joining others in pointing to the most offensive section of the essay:
The proper response to our present, seemingly incommensurable tensions is not to gloss over or seek to rehabilitate the past in such a dishonest way, but to analyse why exactly Islam has largely taken such a dangerous, non-mystical and often political direction in recent times.
This surely has to do with the lamentably premature collapse of the Western colonial empires (as a consequence of the European wars) and the subsequent failure of Third World national development projects, with the connivance of neo-colonial, purely economic exploitation of poorer countries.
Because, of course, the initial colonial national development projects didn’t aim at economic exploitation. Perhaps more disturbing than Milbank’s theoretical death grip on the good old days of ‘the Empire’ is the corresponding sentiment in Phillip Blond, who once informed me that everything good in India resulted from Britain’s influence and that America’s biggest problem was that it wasn’t British any more.
I also second Adam’s criticism of the patronizing position that we should support those forms of Islam that are like Christianity. These of course are the good forms of Islam.
Finally, another particularly brazen assertion:
Christianity already proclaimed a universalism based upon love and the divinity of the human beyond law and custom. Far from being especially mysogynistic, Christianity is itself the sustained source of feminism, and it is evident that even St Paul played a positive role in this respect (so long as one does not absurdly imagine that he could have arrived at modern views concerning female emancipation in the first century AD).
I was reading Marx and Engel’s The German Ideology last night and came across this particularly apt reply:
Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet won this trivial insight. They take every epoch at its word and believe that everything it says and imagines about itself is true.
Perhaps it is just my disposition, but I read Milbank’s statement on feminism with an emphasis on the ‘the’ (as in ‘Christianity is itself the sustained source of feminism’). It could be that this is an uncharitable reading of a grammatical error, but I can’t help but picture him making the statement, completely with a emphatic two handed finger jab thrown in to remind us that Christianity stands up for women’s right to submit dutifully to the authority of men and realize their spiritual potential.
