Recently on EWTN Raymond Arroyo interviewed Robert R. Reilly about his book The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist. During the interview reference was made to the Holy Father’s Regensburg speech, which so inflamed Muslims. The connection to that speech was impossible to avoid. I could likewise not avoid a distant memory of a rather strange experience teaching ESL to a group of young Iranian students many years ago.

It was just around the time of the overthrow of the Shah and the creation of a militant Islamic state in Iran. Several things stand out in my memory of that experience—one was the xenophobia and the incredible wealth that made its enactment possible: one young man’s father bought the large apartment complex where his son was living and removed all the tenants somehow—paid them to move, I guess—so that his son could move his friends in. About half a dozen young Iranian men, all around 20 years old, occupied the entire complex like an enclave. They flew home to Tehran almost every weekend. That kind of money talks loud enough for anybody to hear. The college, located in a large city in Florida, was certainly accustomed to international students, but only with the arrival of that relatively small number of Iranian students did its administration feel that an office for “cultural affairs” should be established.

The ESL course was set up as a lab class. Students progressed individually through a text, and when they felt ready to take an exam on a chapter, I arranged for them to go to the testing center where a proctor administered the exam and graded it. If they passed, I was notified by the proctor and the student proceeded to the next chapter.

One day I was summoned to the “cultural affairs” office. The Iranian students had registered a complaint. The director (and sole employee) of the cultural affairs office explained that they were angry because I did not personally accompany them to the testing center to keep them from cheating. She said they felt that I was the authority figure, not the proctor. Therefore, I should exercise my authority over them—her words, I remember them well. They demanded “authority” over them.

I related this story to a rabbi friend at the time. He said the strange attitude was a consequence of their religion. His response was: “And people in the west wonder why Israel can’t negotiate a peace with these people!”

I was mystified by the incident. Years later, like everyone else, I was mystified by how a religion—any religion—could justify killing masses of innocent people, even children and infants, as valid, lawful, righteous, and justified punishment for “unbelief.”

Reilly talked to Arroyo about the pivotal choice of Muslim theologians in the ninth century (to which the Holy Father’s speech referred) that declared reason to be meaningless. It was that ninth-century event that accounts for the absence of any concept of free will in Islam. There is only dominance and submission; no other human relationship with the divine is conceivable. “Unbelief” becomes a refusal to submit to the deity, punishable by death, and genocidal violence against innocent masses of people becomes a religious act (perpetual “jihad”). Good and evil are merely human ideas, and so, yes, peace negotiations with Israel—or anyone else—would be impossible.

All temporal relationships are extensions of the perceived relationship between the human and the divine. In Islam, there is only one basis: Power. Extreme subjugation of women is inevitable in the presence of a divinized phallic concept. Rulers must necessarily be despots; any form of democracy is impossible, any notion of “consent of the governed” would be meaningless. And it’s quite logical for students to demand that their teachers exercise power over them. I had forgotten the experience with my students that mystified me so long ago until I watched the mystery solved by this television interview.

Addendum:

I met a woman who escaped (literally) a Palestinian settlement where her sister was stoned to death for flirting. Now she is secularized, enlightened, in all ways westernized: She is a militant radical feminist, intent on the eradication of the least vestige of male dominance. I want to tell her that obsession with dominance and submission is a pathology manifested in the sexual aberration of sadomasochism. I want to tell her that role reversal doesn’t eliminate it; that, as a sadist flipped reveals a masochist, so a masochist flipped reveals a sadist; that it’s a shell game where the only way to win is a refusal to play the game at all. But I know she wouldn’t hear me. Terror is an addiction.