A German's vice

A decade ago one Thomas Bauer issued from Münster one of those convivencía arguments; today's West being what it is, Bauer's book has trickled outside the Deutschlands and now has crossed the Channel. Bruce Fudge has reviewed it. (The review as published might not bear Fudge's chosen headline.)

Relevant to historians of late-antiquity, Thomas Bauer does have opinions on Islamic origins, namely that, er, Muhammad existed. His colleague Muhammad Sven Kalish as of 2008 disputed that, in advance of the notorious Robert Spencer although the latter might have arrived late to that party. On this much, which is more important to my work generally, I agree with Bauer 2008. So, on to 2011 and to-day.

Bauer 2011 is the same knock on "Victorianism!" which groomers with PhDs use in universities to turn freshmen. Before "Colonialism!", the Orient was a vast and diverse and harmonious place; afterward, us evil huwite bigots ruined everything. Look what you make them do, scolds Bauer, at all of us other Europeans.

Bauer's text is mostly concerned with what Queen Victoria would consider vices: alcohol and same-sex paederasty. The Quran is (mostly) against both, although - as Bauer notes - contradictions exist. (Sometimes late in the history of the corpus, I've mooted; I think suwar 2, 16, 52, and 76 are post-Muhammadan... like suwar 5 and 11.) Personally I'd allow a moderate indulgence in alcohol although it still escapes me how much paedo a society should allow.

Victoria's society also had ambiguities. The Victorian-era had plenty of pr0n; the printing-press existed, as the Internet keeps reminding us, and if our forebears weren't drinking wine a lot of us had a line in l'absinthe (or laudanum). Well... the wayward brothers of our forebears, mostly; those who didn't get to be our forebears.

As strict Victorians existed outside Buckingham Palace in 1890, strict Islam existed outside the purview of the Madinese fuqahâ (no hamza for them, they're westerners). As to how Islam was practiced in the field, Lawrence Rosen's The Justice of Islam on twentieth-century (Maliki) Morocco should still hold up. As an ideal, Maliki Islam was upheld; if the vice wasn't too obvious, it wasn't prosecuted. Paging Oscar Wilde.

Bauer is, in his own way, an absolutist: you WILL accept vice in society, says Karen's "choose kindness" rainbow t-shirt. The problem with this, we still have lawyers in charge, and it is now up to the lawyers to decide not only the law, but when to apply it. That means: to whom. The lawyers are now tyrants. If you like that society then I invite you to spend a night under the stars in Los Angeles' skid-row.

This was, I suspect, noted very early on in Islam. Its solution is absolutism: and the Quran, itself, even in its ambiguity, is always clear that the ideal is one God, one Law, one final Lawgiver. The very sciences accordingly became mathematical. All this with no input from post-Roman Latin Christendom.

To sum up: Thomas Bauer's book is a brief for a lawless and perverse tyranny as long as Bauer gets to play with the tyrants. Its look at Victorian mores is a caricature and its survey of Islamic history looks uneven at best. Bauer is a bad man who wrote a bad book, and Bruce Fudge did not go nearly far enough.