Taqiya
Two good posts on conservative invocation of “taqiya” which they see as basically a fancy Arabic term for “lying” that explains why you can’t trust Muslims. First, Matt Duss explains that’s not really what it means. Second, Ezra Klein points out that it’s odd to develop an elaborate conceptual apparatus to explain the phenomenon that political leaders in Muslim countries sometimes lie. This is something they have in common with Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, etc. political leaders. And, indeed, with non-politicians.
This sort of thing has been an all-too-common feature of America’s post-9/11 discourse. I distinctly remember reading somewhere something genuinely well-meaning which explained that Iraqi men didn’t like to be awoken in the middle of the night, handcuffed in front of their wife and children, and dragged out of their homes because they live in a society that places a high premium on honor. As if somewhere there’s a society where people think that kind of thing is no big deal. I believe “orientalism” is the term.
47 Responses to “Taqiya”
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November 11th, 2008 at 9:57 am
amen. the coverage of abu ghraib was similarly bizarre, with all the talk of arab societies being ultra-sensitive to sexual humiliation.
i’m not sure you’d be able to get away with that kind of bullshit in a country where even the educated elite are unlikely to have travelled extensively.
November 11th, 2008 at 9:58 am
correction: i’m not sure you’d be able to get away with that bullshit IF WE DIDN’T LIVE IN a country where even the educated are unlikely to have travelled extensively.
November 11th, 2008 at 10:04 am
So “taqiya” = spin, which the right has turned into a sort of perverse art form. It’s always interesting to see how eager they are to accuse others of doing exactly what they themselves are doing, apparently hoping nobody notices the idiocy.
November 11th, 2008 at 10:09 am
You don’t get it. Because everyone is convinced – convinced! – that Islam is going to Conquer the World and haul us off to the ovens, in our panty piddling paranoia anything bad said about them must be true. It must!
November 11th, 2008 at 10:09 am
The whole British public (private to Usonians) school system is built around training pupils to lie convincingly, to such an extent that every graduate of it is a sociopath. After all it was an ex-British public school boy who made “economical with the truth” popular again:
November 11th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Next you will tell us that a madarsa is just a school
and not the hotbed for training terrorists to
kill all kafirs.
November 11th, 2008 at 10:18 am
NSinNY – i preferred sarcasm to truth!
November 11th, 2008 at 10:24 am
What do we call it in this country when our Christian leaders lie to our people and have his underlings lie to the United Nations and the world? We need a fancy word for it.
November 11th, 2008 at 10:25 am
Was there a native American term to describe the White Man’s inability to keep his word to them?
November 11th, 2008 at 10:29 am
El Cid Says: Was there a native American term to describe the White Man’s inability to keep his word to them?
I’m pretty sure it was “motherfucker”.
November 11th, 2008 at 10:50 am
forked tongue?
November 11th, 2008 at 10:53 am
From the people who taught the world that free markets are self-governing and self-correcting…
November 11th, 2008 at 10:53 am
Rather like how the Kol Nidre prayer explains Jewish perfidy –>
November 11th, 2008 at 10:53 am
missing link http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_International_Jew:_The_World%27s_Foremost_Problem/Chapter_71
November 11th, 2008 at 11:15 am
A few hundred years ago in England, the same sort of thing was said by protestants about catholics. The scare word then was “equivocation”: in order to prevent illegal priests from being caught by the authorities, it was permissible to use misleading (though not literally false) language. Protestants interpreted this to mean that all those Jesuits were a bunch of scheming unscrupulous deceivers.
There was a good book about the gunpowder plot a while ago — I’ve forgotten title and author (Mary Something?) — that pointed out that the idea of “equivocation” (and, I’d add, “taqiya”) in fact reveals a particularly sensitive honesty. These terms are developed to give an answer to the question, “is it permissible to lie to your persecutors in order to avoid persecution?” Most of us would say “yes, of course,” and have no trouble with it. But some strict Catholics (and, apparently, some strict Muslims) feel that this is a more knotty problem, and come up with special conceptual space for the very rare cases of permissible deception. There’s no need to do that unless you have a quite strong taboo against lying in general.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:18 am
Wait, middle easterners are so primitive that need to ACCEPT that their bullshit is LIES, albeit justifiable lies? They can’t automatically convince themselves its the Truth with a capital T?
Saddam was responsible for 9/11. Obama is an Arab Muslim socialist who palls around with terrorists. What’s that, the Iraq war is a mess and Bush fucked up the economy? Hmmm, in that case, I do believe I was lied to about Saddam and Obama, well, he’s a good fellow Christian, albeit still a socialist.
The maxim “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it” is true in any decent society and I don’t know why Iran etc. would be any different.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Great post.
Although I thought the reigning explanation as to why Iraqi men don’t like to be handcuffed and dragged out of their homes was more about something to do with the importance of maintaining the sanctity of the home in arab culture, or something like that. I remember hearing that explanation a while ago as to why Iraqis might be upset about soldiers suddenly bursting in their homes unannounced. “Honor” is more the explanation for why they don’t like to be held in prison on trumped-up or nonexistent charges.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Oooh! Oooh! You forgot about how the Arabs are obsessed with conspiracy theories–like how Saddam’s intel services were meeting with Al Qaeda in Eastern Europe…or all the WMD were moved to Syria or hidden on a cargo ship in the Indian Ocean…
November 11th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Yeah, taqiya is a term that has been consistently misused. It has a specific meaning: hiding, or denying, that you are Shi’a in order to avoid persecution in non-Shi’a societies. It has been invoked by many notable Shi’a throughout Islamic history, allowing them to keep their Shi’ism secret and stay alive. Rumor has it that some high vazirs during the Abbasid Caliphate were Shi’a under taqiya, and sundry Seljuk bureaucrats and Mughal aristocrats. And most importantly, many of the early expositors of Shi’a theology and thought were living under taqiya as Sunni.
More to the point: it’s illegal to be Shi’i in Malaysia right now, and I know firsthand that there are many Shi’a doing taqiya there right now.
November 11th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Rather odd for the Straussian right to be complaining about “taqiya,” anyway.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5010.htm
It is always all about projection with these people . . .
November 11th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
A few hundred years ago in England, the same sort of thing was said by protestants about catholics.
Also a hundred years ago, by Charles Kingsley about Cardinal Newman.
November 11th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
The whole British public (private to Usonians) school system is built around training pupils to lie convincingly, to such an extent that every graduate of it is a sociopath.
Eton College – The Real Madrassah?
I hope you aren’t being serious here.
November 11th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
A: The problem with Muslims is they lie all the time.
B: Everybody lies all time.
A: Yeah, but I’m talking about Muslims.
November 11th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
This post is half smart, half stupid.
It’s appropriate and necessary to ridicule right wing idiots who latch onto and distort terms like “taqiya” as a way of arguing that Muslims are inherently untrustworthy.
But, to move from that observation to impugning anyone who calls attention to the relative importance of family honor in Arab societies (and the possible implications of that importance for counterinsurgency tactics) – that’s pretty dumb. Not all cultural tendencies are a figment of “orientalist” imagination.
November 11th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
These terms are developed to give an answer to the question, “is it permissible to lie to your persecutors in order to avoid persecution?” Most of us would say “yes, of course,” and have no trouble with it.
I don’t know, I think a lot of us would give a different answer depending on what kind of persecution. Maybe it’s natural to lie to persecutors, but we really respect the people who don’t: we venerate martyrs to religious causes, and to sufficiently respected secular causes as well. “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” That guy in A Tale of Two Cities.
So maybe we’d say that the right thing to do is to stand up for your principles, (that is, maybe we’d say that if we weren’t in the middle of mocking people worried about taqiya at the moment) but when push came to shove we wouldn’t do so, and we’d probably feel a little ashamed about being cowardly like that even though most people would understand.
November 11th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
I don’t think MY is getting the correct takeaway point. In fact this talk about taqiya is part of the same effort that happened before the Iraq War–to try to argue that our current enemy should be seen as an exemption from all the standard notions about deterrent that we find in international relations theory. E.g.Saddam is nuts, therefore he won’t respond to threats like every other human being does.
Similarly, we’re supposed to believe that all the Iranian talk of wanting to avoid being incinerated by a joint American-Israeli nuclear retaliation is all an elaborate ruse, and that in fact we should presume that they are eagerly working to toward being able to launch a nuclear first stike against Israel.
November 11th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Re: That guy in A Tale of Two Cities.
Er, Sydney Carton went to the scaffold out of personal friendship and loyalty, not ideological conviction. And the man in whose place he was executed, was sentenced to death for being part of a notoriously oppressive family, not for his ideological beliefs. Your general point stands, though.
I believe that Christianity (and Judaism, see the histories of the Maccabbean martyrs) has traditionally encouraged us not to deny our faith even if it means persecution, that’s the reason we venerate the Roman martyrs. Certainly I think Christians are forbidden from performing _blasphemous acts_ like trampling on crosses to persuade persecutors that they aren’t Christian. However people who do transgress that rule have traditionally been viewed with a fair degree of mercy, and the idea that it was some sort of unforgivable sin was condemned as the heresy of Donatism.
I think it’s more important to speak the truth than to mock people accused of ‘taqiyya’ or whatever.
November 11th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Interestingly there was a similar myth perpetrated by anti-semites in the 19th and 20th century claiming that the Talmud allowed Jews to lie to or harm Christians. Again a few terms in poor translation and taken out of context can do a lot of damage.
November 11th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Geez, and I thought Matt just forgot how to spell ‘tequila’.
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