'Ne sutor ultra crepidam'

English version: "Cobbler, stick to thy last," meaning "Do not presume to address matters beyond your competence." Though no credentialed Islamicist, I did presume in my last column to make two claims: that by normal standards of political and economic reckoning the contemporary West is superior to the Islamic world and that terrorism committed in the name of Islam does actually have something to do with Islam. One task of a 'Prince' columnist is to stimulate campus debate, so I am not aggrieved by ripostes from Karen Bauer GS and my much-admired colleague Peter Brown. I do reject Ms. Bauer's mistaken charge of "essentialism," as also its politer echo by professor Brown: "Unlike professor Fleming, I have concluded that [Islam] is an infinitely rich and complex civilization." I uttered no conclusion about the opulence or complexity of historic Islamic civilization, and in addressing my topic, the relationship between religious culture and terrorism today, I took pains to avoid sweeping generalizations such as "most Muslims," let alone "all Muslims." I said "large swaths of Islam."

The charge of ultracrepidarianism I cannot so easily dismiss. Certainly the scholar in me wants to endorse Brown's preference for expert advice. Yet I wrote my column only after gagging on the thin gruel of political correctness served up by the experts to whom I had turned hungering for solider fare. Thus according to Karen Armstrong, a best-selling superstar of Islamic studies from whom I have learned much, the "vast majority of Muslims [in the world] are horrified by the atrocity of Sept. 11." If so, it is a puzzlingly mute majority. One struggles to imagine any possible basis, aside from wishful thinking, for Armstrong's claim. Even uncredentialed Islamicists know that in the "vast majority" of Islamic polities the scientific polling of public opinion is forbidden. Still we may get a hint of global Muslim opinion from two oases of political liberalism where the polls are occasionally open: the Palestinian Authority and Pakistan. According to recent Birzeit and Gallup polls 28 percent of Palestinians and 24 percent of Pakistanis (for Pakistan, that's 34 million, several "large swaths") believe that the attack on the Trade Towers violated no religious or legal principle of Islam. Nor for a moment are the other three-quarters "horrified" at the actions of fellow Muslims, since very large numbers deny that any Muslim was involved; a staggering proportion insist that the attack was conducted by the Mossad or unidentified Americans.

I do not know for a fact that Osama bin Laden is behind the recent terror attacks, but anyone can read his published incitements to "war against Christians and Jews" and his religious decree that "to kill the Americans and their allies is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it . . . This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God." What do Pakistanis think about the author of these views? Six percent call him a "terrorist," 82 percent a "righteous religious warrior."

Such statistics render fatuous the widely quoted opinion of another academic Islamic expert, professor Mark Juergensmeyer, author of a book on "religious terrorism" examined ecumenically. "Osama bin Laden is to Islam like Timothy McVeigh is to Christianity," Juergensmeyer wrote. The contextual meaning of this sentence is that the two men are aberrant or eccentric figures, isolated at the lonely fringes of their religious traditions. Many analogies have their debilities, but this one lacks the pep even to sit up in bed. Waive the fact that McVeigh claimed no religious motive, let alone a hardwire to "the words of Almighty God;" forget that the only sacred text he invoked was Henley's poem "Invictus," a relic of muscular Victorian agnosticism found in old high-school literature anthologies. When the monks on Mount Athos start wearing Tim McVeigh sweatshirts, when eighth graders carry McVeigh's photograph through Reykjavik schoolyards screaming "Death to the dog Omar!," when Methodist missionaries in Kerala write hymns in praise of McVeigh, when "Timothy" becomes the most popular baptismal name bestowed on boys born in Brazil, in short when many millions of Christians throughout the world hold McVeigh up as an ideal religious figure — then Professor Juergensmeyer will have met the challenge of analogy and may proceed to his next challenge, English grammar.

On the day (Oct. 26) I write this, there appears in the Times a letter "To American Muslims" from a private person unknown to me, Syed Asad, who says: "As a secular American Muslim, I feel compelled to advise fellow American Muslims that we must recognize that the World Trade Center attack was an act of mass murder, pure and simple." Why "compelled?" Because "many Muslims seem to be in deep denial." Indeed. Some professional Islamicists seem to be there too. My opinions may be ignorant. Having never visited Egypt, and thus being dependent upon what "Middle East experts" write, I may be wrong in claiming that the publishing industry is not robust in that land. Having never lectured at the Pakistani madrasah, where urchins are taught the religious duty to kill me but may still get a pass diploma merely by hating me ferociously, I am perhaps bigoted in my supposition that the scriptural study there must be of a very primitive kind. But I must say I doubt it. I would write no further ultracrepidarian essays, devoutly hoping that my future commerce with the "Islamic world" might be exclusively with irenic persons like my compatriot Asad — or, at my cobbler's last of Medieval Studies, with the likes of Averroes, Ibn-Khaldun, the sweet poet Hafiz and other giants of the "rich and complex" Islamic civilization that I admire less than Peter Brown only in the want of erudition needed to appreciate it the more. But "infenestrating Islam" — the guys proclaiming the greatness of Almighty God by flying 767s through the window — broke my train of thought. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.