The Stranger and I

27Aug/1016

The Stranger and I

I am not sure what to do with how I have come to feel about Islam in general and Muslims in general.

I suppose I struggle in good company. But there is no solace. In fact, I am agitated that I have to forcefully re-orient my thoughts as they occur at the sight of a Muslim, a mosque - or when I enter within earshot of the alien sounds they make when they speak. I have to remind myself to relax my brow and not to glare. I have to relax the muscles of my clenched jaw.

It is not as if I have a personal issue personally with any given Muslim person. And herein is the rub, as they say.

My involuntary sentiments smack of something dark. I imagine soaring inches above a murky lake and inadvertently touching the tip of a wing to the deceivingly placid surface. I don't tumble into the water at the temporary drag... but it does give me pause.

I wonder if my children pick up on it.

I would not consider myself a racist or a xenophobe. And I won't proclaim that I am so very beyond harboring a sliver of deep distrust. Nor will I pretend it is but a sliver. The creaturely part of me signals as if I need be on guard when I am around The Them. And it bothers me that I do feel this way involuntarily.

A large part of why it bothers me is that I am a Christian. And I am called to love all of God's children. Here too I am in good company. Show me a Christian who cannot be called a hypocrite and I will show you the Face of Christ Himself. Nevertheless, as a Christian man I am to love each and every person as a creation of God - with inherent dignity I cannot deny.

But the conflict in my being also has to do with the fact that as a human I am called to reason - and away from emotion - away from empty impulse. Something many of my compatriots to the left and right fail to appreciate. This thing called Reason can be tricky. On the one hand, I have not had rotten dealings with Muslims. To the contrary, the very, very few I have had dealings with have been fine. No different than anyone else I have come into contact with - not substantially so anyway. But Reason herself dictates accounting for what I see and what I hear with my own eyes and my own ears. What I witness. It serves none to pretend, for instance, that a Flamingo is a Penguin. That a ringing phone is in fact a dryer announcing a completed cycle. Some are able to disregard the obvious. I am not one of them.

Thinking about how I feel about The Them, I am at once bothered by my inability to shake a very real sense of mistrust. Mistrust beyond not wanting to interact with The Them... mistrust in a defensive way. That is, it is not the fact that The Them are exotic to most every sensibility of mine. No. This mistrust is something different. It seems to come from a place which feels threatened. Like a man who is walking barefoot through knee-high grass in Rattlesnake Country. I mean to say, while I am bothered by the assault on our liberties that I do believe many an imam sees as the End Game, the feeling of imminent threat is similar to what a man feels before going into battle.

And here I begin to wonder. Why is it that every aspect of my physical person feels amped-up as for a fight? Why do I feel like I have to keep my head on a swivel... at high alert? Is it because I am fooling myself? Making something out of nothing? Or is it something else?

When I look into the eyes of Islam, I may see a reflection of myself ... but how can I ignore the face to which those eyes belong - with its clenched teeth and tense brow?

Hello, Stranger. My Old Rival. My Enemy. I prefer peace. But I recognize you. Don't doubt it for a minute.

Enoch_Root

Person with kids,a beautiful wife, a job. Catholic of the Latin Rite.

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Comments (16) Trackbacks (1) ( subscribe to comments on this post )

Cowboy
August 27th, 2010 - 10:26

Beautiful piece, Enoch. Your self-awareness humbles me.

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Tony Verre
August 27th, 2010 - 10:39

Well, it was honest. It was worth putting out there, but I fear that you have fallen into the trap of DISTRACTION. As a blogger, it’s hot enough topic to draft eyes and attention. I get that.

For me, personally, I’d like to the see the post that shows this for what it is: distraction while the the crust beneath your feet crumbles. It’s MSM trying to make a catalyst of the “american, patriotic” sentiment. Find a new enemy other than in your front door (Wall St, Oligarchy, a Fascist state). This falls, for me, into the category of “look right here” while the things you should be paying attention to go down over there.

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- Enoch_Root
  August 27th, 2010 - 10:44
  
  I’ll agree your insight may have merits – my heightened sense that something is very very wrong and about to get much much worse may be in part to an overarching sense that I am being had. That I am being purposefully lied to day in and day out. And that the Usual Suspects are simply phantoms. I dunno – worth some thought.
  
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- Enoch_Root
  August 27th, 2010 - 10:47
  
  but out of curiosity, Tony, what are we being distracted from in your estimation?
  
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Joe
August 27th, 2010 - 13:40

Bloomberg speaks:

“The difference is we’re in an election season. And this whole issue, I think, will go away right after the next election. This is plain and simple people trying to stir up things to get publicity and trying to polarize people so that they can get some votes. And I don’t think that most of these people who are yelling and screaming really care one way or another.”

Bloomberg is also saying: Stop yelling and screaming bitter clingers. You are against freedom and unamerican. And lay off the trans fats and smokes or we will make you lay off them.

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The Sanity Inspector
August 27th, 2010 - 17:34

Great piece, Enoch. I’ve had the same feelings, but couldn’t blog them because they were so inchoate.

Poor innocent Muslims…”every snowflake in an avalanche can plead not guilty.”

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The Sanity Inspector
August 27th, 2010 - 17:40

Islam is an enemy civilization. A civilization, yes. An enemy, yes–with all the confrontations and standoffs and truces that implies. And when Islam gets the whip hand…

The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within. The Hindus had allowed their strength to be wasted in internal division and war; they had adopted religions like Buddhism and Jainism, which unnerved them for the tasks of life; they had failed to organize their forces for the protection of their frontiers and their capitals, their wealth and their freedom, from the hordes of Scythians, Huns, Afghans and Turks hovering about India’s boundaries and waiting for national weakness to let them in. For four hundred years (600-1000 A.D.) India invited conquest; and at last it came.

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Snaqwells
August 27th, 2010 - 18:54

My initial thoughts: It’s perhaps similar to the fear parents feel about a stranger abducting their child. Statistics show the likelihood is infinitesimal; yet it seems to be every parent’s fear.

At the same time, the fear isn’t entirely unfounded. I would hate to be the parent who was cavalier about the risk, only to find my child to be included in those infinitesimal statistics.

The likelihood of the muslim on the street actually planting a bomb is extremely small; yet none of us wants to be the guy on the news saying, “Yeah, I saw him, and I thought he looked shifty, but I didn’t think he had really done something.”

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Kill Truck
August 27th, 2010 - 19:09

I’d feel more positive about moderate Muslims if they would police their own more and call the people acknowledging the elephant in the room bigots less.

P.S. Congrats on the huge cojones it took to post that.

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- enoch_root
  September 7th, 2010 - 07:21
  
  thx for saying so.
  
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serr8d
August 27th, 2010 - 19:45

I’m thinking this tiny, tiny Mosque problem is the least of our worries. A better writer ‘splains it to us…

The strands of the Internet hum with confusion, anger, and message manipulation from an increasingly desperate Left. Their last-ditch strategy involves brewing up a petri dish full of viral memes about the conservative grassroots, in the hope of weakening their resolve, and perhaps frightening a few independents into staying home in November. They hope to nourish the disgust of the “pox on both their houses” types into lethargy.

It’s not going to work. The next two elections are vitally important, and we remain focused. I hope we’ll also remember the lesson that all elections are important. Today’s crisis is the output of many generations of error.

We are not “distracted” by debates such as the Ground Zero mosque. Expressing opposition to this project is not a mind-melting exercise. Islam is still infused with too much of the bloody darkness that terrorized the aisles of United 93, United 175, American 11, and American 77 with box-cutters gripped in its tendrils. The organizers of the Cordoba House project have been unwilling to denounce that darkness without qualification. “Outreach” and “tolerance” are vitally needed in the Muslim world, not the streets of Manhattan. This only seems complicated to those who willfully blindfold themselves with ideology, or subordinate common sense to political calculation.

And so on.

We’ve got to worry about, as Tony says above, the real problems facing this nation; most of which are the moochers who’ve voted in the looters who’ve implanted the dirty socialisms in our political system. We will fail, economically, catastrophically, and sooner than later. That’s the real problem. Pointing fingers at the Mosque builders is like a dying man pointing at the various vultures circling to feed on his soon-to-be-dead carcass.

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- enoch_root
  September 7th, 2010 - 07:22
  
  I wasnt even thinking of the mosk thingy.
  
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Mark A
August 28th, 2010 - 10:44

Your ‘amped-up’ feeling is the natural by-product of your discernment. You have that feeling for good reasons, so don’t let a mind parasite enter your thoughts and convince you that it’s somehow ‘wrong’ of you to feel that way. Discernment is a gift, and you have it in spades my friend.

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sofa
August 28th, 2010 - 16:35

Islam is jihad. Being targetted for death, re-education, and enslavement has all of us intended victims ready to strike down evil (and each and every snowflake, for all time).

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Geoffrey Britain
August 30th, 2010 - 15:32

You are not alone in either that feeling or in the perception that the vast majority of Muslims are just ordinary people with the same mix of good intentions and selfish immaturities that make up the norm in the human race.

I suspect the vague sense of disquiet that you and so many others evince and which, you describe so evocatively is due to a subconscious appreciation of Islam’s historical and current behavior. There are more than 12,000 passages in the Qur’an that disparage and call for violence against the ‘infidel’. The Qur’an, which every Muslim accepts, at least publicly, as the direct word of God, proclaims that the world is naturally divided into two camps; the ‘house’ of Islam and the ‘house’ of WAR. We live in the ‘house’ of war and thus any act of violence by a Muslim against a non-Muslim is excused as inherently valid.

Since 9/11 there have been more than 13,000 acts of terrorism perpetrated by Muslims against non-Muslims, acts of terrorism precipitated on virtually every front of Islam’s borders with non-Muslim majority countries.

The ‘moderate’ Muslims, who are in the great majority, know well the violent precepts of their religion, know that it is the ‘radicals’ whose interpretation of the Qur’an injunctions is the more theologically sound and that is why they are silent.

Understanding the The Theological Nature of Islam even if only sensed subconsciously, cannothelp filling anon-Muslimwith disquiet.

Sometimes we sense danger, before we see it.

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baldilocks
August 30th, 2010 - 16:16

There are many Christian eschatologists who have surmised that the Antichrist’s kingdom will be an Islamic one. I don’t know, but the description of the AC sure bears an uncanny similarity to that of the Mahdi.

Congratulations, Enoch. Excellent post.

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