The recent tragedy at Ft. Hood has re-introduced a number of tensions and questions to the public imagination concerning ongoing wars and religious aspects of terrorism. There has been the usual over-reaching in accusations and conclusions, but I think that on the whole a stance of "wait for more information" has been well-practiced and prevented major backlash.
One question that has been coming up for me through all of this is the possible terms for an individual to conscientiously object from military policy. One can now find a number of details about Nidal Malik Hasan's religious commitments and their posited relationship with the Ft. Hood massacre. Rather than dwell either on the narratives that make him an Islamic terrorist or, on the other hand, make him an Islamic victim of American abuse, I'd like to look at Hasan as a Muslim amongst fellow Muslims, and how he appears to have reconciled or failed to reconcile this with his military commitments.
A classmate of Hasan apparently spoke of him as "a Muslim first and an American second." I took it that the classmate thought such a prioritization was problematic, though it seems exactly the right way around to me. I'm certainly a Christian first and an American second, and it strikes me as rather dangerous for any religious person to consider their political commitments as more central than their faith commitments.
There have also been many cries of "the Army should have never let this guy in!", or "the Army should have kicked this guy out!" ...which again strikes me as odd. It seems that Hasan was trying with all his might to get out. Without at all attempting to offer a justification for the murders he committed, Hasan doesn't seem to have been an embedded violent plotter, and insofar as he was unstable or dangerous, one can't ignore the fact that he was trying his darndest to voice his concerns and leave a situation of which he disapproved.
One explanation of Hasan's objection to the Iraq War and his own pending deployment was that he did not want to have the blood of fellow Muslims on his hands, and this stands at the heart of what I want to consider. It strikes me that potential violence against co-religionists is an eminently defensible basis for selective conscientious objection to a war.
I am not especially knowledgeable of the legal aspects of objection to military service, or the current status of selective objection. John Courtney Murray spoke on the matter during the Vietnam War, and offers some good considerations of the importance of selective objection, the difficulties that are introduced by it, and its relationship to just war doctrine.
I think that the assumptions of Hasan's classmate-- that it's a matter of concern for someone to be religious first and patriotic second-- is one major reason why it's odd for us to even consider possible violence against one's religious fellows as a viable basis for objection to military service. Perhaps we are too used to military conflicts between nation states with large Christian populations on either side to think about warmaking or nation-state composition in these terms. Certainly now that we're engaged in a "war on terror," it's difficult to entertain most any reflection of religious commitment as superseding political commitment as an ordering structure for civic life. But I think this is a dangerous and limiting constraint on our political imagination. For all the talk of "radicalizing" factors in religious communities, what has probably done the most to radicalize elements of modern social life is our inability to balance different commitments as reasonable partakers in the moral life of people. While Hasan's crime is certainly not excused by his constant pleas to be excused from a commitment which was a grave moral hazard in his eyes, it is certainly worth considering whether a receptive response to these concerns might have prevented the tragedy that ended up unfolding. On a broader scale, such considerations might have helped us think through our warmaking policy, which has tended to dance rather awkwardly on the razor sharp line that winds between and across religious and secular politics.
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Clark Kerr on Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor
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Good thoughts - particularly your point about priorities and commitments. I would suspect that people would have much less of a problem with the statement that "I'm a Christian first and an American second" than they would with "I'm a Muslim first and an American second" - but that's a whole other issue.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure where I fall on the issue of selective conscientious objection, but I do find one facet of this incredibly ironic. Currently, a lot of the blood of there is shed as a result of a civil war between different Muslim sects, with the American military largely trying to keep the violence down. Granted, (1.) we introduced the conditions that lead to this civil war, and (2.) we're still killing Muslims - but I think Hasan's idea that the Muslim world is suffering now because of the American military presence is at best somewhat misconstrued. The violence in the Middle East right now is largely a product of Muslims fighting Muslims - something Christians have a lot of experience with from back in the 17th century. I've been a critic of a lot of American military policy in the Middle East, but to pretend that this violence can be chalked up to Western intervention is very misleading on his part - we shouldn't let him off so easily.
Put it this way - who do you think the average Iraqi Sunni citizen is more afraid of: American soldiers who deposed their Sunni dictator, or the Shia majority??? Despite all we've done in Iraq, I don't think it's American soldiers that they're most afraid of.
In fact - it's a testament to how American Hasan was that he even thinks Muslims shouldn't be killing other Muslims. That's certainly not a common view in the Muslim world.
ReplyDeleteI think you're right to scrutinize the reasons given for opposition to US wars in the Middle East, and I wouldn't want to be construed here as saying that he was right or not in his views, or even that conscientious objection on such grounds should be upheld in every case. From what I gather he did construe the "war on terror" as a "war on Islam", and insofar as that's not the case, his argument is going to be problematic.
ReplyDeleteBut on the same logic that you point out the complexity of the Iraq War situation and the civil war that is taking place amongst Muslims, I'm trying to argue against a monolithic conceptualization of "religious commitment" and "political commitment". Rejecting these strong distinctions would conceivably allow an American Muslim to conscientiously object to wars conducted identifiably against fellow Muslims, and moreover would allow this objection as likewise one against what is going on within Iraq amongst Iraqi citizens.
Another more obvious point is that Hasan's profession would probably mean that he wouldn't be killing anyone in any case, so with regard to his particular motives for possibly objecting, I think we can safely say that he would have failed to satisfy certain standards. As a thought experiment for considering religious and secular politics more generally, though, I think there are some helpful aspects of the story.
Re: the last sentence of my second paragraph... what I'm trying to say is that such an objection could be viewed as religiously critical as much as it is politically critical. And as you say, insofar as he developed such criticisms through American influences, it is a testament to his Americanism... but not, I assume, in a way that precludes it from also being a testament to his Islamic identity.
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