Everybody's
business
By William F. Buckley Jr.
Tue Aug 1, 8:04 PM ET
Yahoo!News
The old injunction about minding your own business has always
been a little problematic, because carried to formal lengths it
distresses other laws, laws that have to do with being one's brother's
keeper. From large-scale national perspectives, there are the laws that
translate into maintaining balances of power. You can try to ignore it
when you hear that Hitler has ultimate solutions about how to deal with
Germany's Jews, but meanwhile it makes sense to maintain your fleet in
good condition, never mind if regulating German Jews is other people's
business.
Itchy stuff. In the 19th century, moral realities hardened on the
subject of slavery. That too had been thought of as other people's
business for a long time, even when the "other people" were your
neighbors. After a while, it was felt that slavery was other people's
business only if the practice of it was removed at least by regional
boundaries. And then after a couple of generations, it was resolved
that slavery was not a business to be tolerated anywhere within the
nation's territory; and so on.
The problem of which communities' practices continue to be sheltered as
other people's business is lightly touched on in a huge story in The
New York Times on Tuesday about what they are taking to be their own
business in a province of Indonesia. Aceh is a straitlaced part of the
Muslim community. The big photo shows a man standing in a long white
shirt looking down. On his left is a man dressed in black whose face is
shrouded by a mask. He is holding what looks like a long stick. In fact
it is a rattan cane, about a meter long and 0.75 centimeters thick.
The photo depicts one stroke laid on by the "executor" -- that is what
the Wilayatul Hisbah are called, the enforcers of Shariah, or Muslim
law. The camera caught the swing of the cane because the prisoner was
still standing. The story says that on the seventh stroke, he fell down
in a faint. His sentence was 40 lashes of the cane, and the eager crowd
was promised that when the man came back to life, he would receive the
balance due of his sentence, another 33 strokes.
One is permitted to pause in cosmopolitan surprise that seven strokes
of the rattan cane, inflicted on a man's back, would cause him to pass
out. Old Etonians must be especially skeptical, though their own
Wilayatul Hisbahs aimed at buttocks, not backs, but often went on past
a seventh stroke, with not much evidence of students fainting.
But the point here being made is that there is in Aceh a revival of
Muslim fundamentalism. "Aceh," the reporter tells us, "is undergoing a
profound transformation that is likely to have considerable impact on
the nature of Islam in Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country." We
learn that there are more than 40 prisoners arrested for thievery, and
it is being deliberated whether to chop off their hands. We are
reminded that this remains the practice in Saudi Arabia, and one is
left to suppose that it is routine. If it were spectacularly unusual,
it would presumably have rated a photo and a story in The New York
Times. But engines of the news cannot be alert to mundane torture. If
somebody is going to be hanged every morning at Tyburn, after a while
one loses interest, and that, really, is the point of this essay.
Much hangs on the development of Muslim practice in the 21st century.
It can't remain somebody else's business exclusively if organized
communities take to chopping off people's hands. The Times article
describes the arrest of three women in Aceh. Their crime? They were
sitting in a secluded section of a hotel corridor without their head
scarves. Inasmuch as the Shariah is being developed, restored, revived,
evolved, it matters greatly in what direction it is developing. We know
that cheek by jowl in the Middle East we have had developments along
the lines of the Taliban, with torture and death, and along different
lines, as in Turkey and Egypt. It is precisely an urgent moral concern
what practices will govern life and law enforcement in Iraq -- and
Lebanon and Syria.
It has been a matter of huge reluctance even to think of, let alone
refer to, a great religious-moral collision approaching, setting Islam
against the Judaeo-Christian world. The old counsel is to be permissive
about what other people do, especially if they are self-governing. But
in present circumstances, these do not consolidate as purely local
matters. What happens in Aceh, when fundamentalist Islam is reviving
throughout Indonesia, is exactly as reported, a matter of profound
international concern.