It strikes me that the cartoon controversy has been covered extensively elsewhere (if with unrelentingly more heat than light). And as usual, in these cultural clashes, the points of view can be summed up by Chris Rock's astute cap of the OJ Simpson verdict: "Black people too happy, white people too mad." Of course the sad matter of this more parlous situation deflates the humor of Rock's pop-Bakhtin. Here, those who are all too proud of the cartoons and their abreaction (with a few notable exceptions: the Salient's coverage is far more mature than the Bild-esque context in which the cartoons originally appeared), represent the culture in hegemony, and the furious multitudes are those without the ability or audience for meaningful political discourse. (They are even deflated in the language used to describe their anger — furor, with all of its attendant implications of blind and sinous rage, has not made so many appearances in print since Neoptolemus' appearance in Priam's court.) So CNN beckons with its artificial perma-shock: Welcome to Live! Violent Protest, the chu-moy amplifier of the great unwashed. And the tireless media's most tiresome meme must be that of the salted wound: that the Hegemons are right, and like, Wolf: How Ironic Is That? These cartoons, which we cannot show (the vicious innocuousness of their iconography escapes our Western eyes), which the television makes pornography through its constant contentual tease, are used to further drive away the complex question of elective identities and displaced political expression. In its place we are given the simple visual fascism of the Colonel versus the Muslim Id.

But let us unpack this neat formulation. How about the highest irony of this basest play? That the worst actors in this conflict are its "neutral" catalysts: the Western media and the Oriental tyrants. This is not entirely fair. There have been light bringers among the torch bearers. But as much as the New York Times and a few other thoughtful outlets have tried to highlight the local politics underlying the protests that have roiled the Islamic world, they have been shouted down by both their sensational antagonists in America and their tyrant busked objects overseas. In part, this local shouting down is legitimate, since the bourgeois press has offered Islam-lite apologetics over Islamic analysis for the past few years. Who has time to criticize the Salafi imbeciles who make takfir? It's hard to tell the sides apart, the readers won't care about the distinction, viciously questionable CAIR will complain anyway, and it's a lot to ask of casually Jewish and Episcopalian editors to wade through various sects of Islamist Protestants (difficult enough with Christian denominations, especially on a news staff ignorant of the Sermon on the Mount).

But occasionally the Times comes through with solid reporting of the more than one moderate Moroccan in a souk interview variety (Dexter Filkins comes to mind). This article, "Furor Over Cartoons Pits Muslims against Muslims," deserves to be internalized. Slackman and Fattah give us a blog style roundup of Arab press reactions to the controversy. And contained within the article are the glimmerings of the brave irreducible. Jihad Momani, the editor of Shihan, is the actual face of progressive Islam, however more palatable Irshad Manji might be. Momani, and his Yemeni counterpart Muhammad al-Assadi, are heroes of recognition — not demagogues, or activists, or comfortable exilic observers, or even liberal — but internal dissidents, whose refusal to allow their juridical selves to be murdered is antithetical to their totalitarian surroundings. Momani and al-Assadi's sin is to question:

What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras, or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony?

And because this is a question the secular satraps cannot answer, because it reveals their inability to maintain political totality, and because this is a question that the fundamentalists cannot answer, because it reveals their inability to be free of ideological contamination, it is a question whose very asking means that those who dare ask it will be crushed under the iron shod boots of competing purities. Here are heroes of our day. Here are heroes for our time.

What this Times article illuminates is why the internal political reaction to these moderate questions has been so extreme. After all, the reaction of King Abdullah II was to decree the publication by Shihan a "corruption on earth, which cannot be accepted or excused under any circumstances." (The extremity of the fundamentalist reaction needs no such explanation.) It is not because the Arab satrapies are so conservative, but rather because they are so weak, and these questions so benign. In danger of losing control to an opposing totality (as this recent Times article documents), these sick men of Arabia (surviving by three generations the Ottoman grandfather) have exercised control where it is easiest to do so, not against their toughest critics, but their most moderate. Here at last is the real perverse carnival in this animated dispute, as the failed states of the Arab world prepare their most timid questioners for an auto-da-fe run by their most serious enemies. Woe for the artist before Savonarola — the Medici with their whores are about to use you for barricade kindling.

What is historically comforting (if dangerously historicist), is that the precedent for state weakness and Protestant fundamentalism in conflict is also the story of the dominant emergence of liberalism in the West. The wave of purifying anger that rose against the corrupt states of Europe and their purchased papacies subsided as the tools of rational interrogation were folded inwards. The atomism of Luther (with his attendant anti-Semitism and half-hearted support of revolution) is at its heart an individual doctrine. And after it had translated the Gnostic Scholasticism and base indulgence of the Leviathan-like Church into a personal Christianity (much as al-Muwahhidun mean to move Islam away from the corruptive bidah of the material West), it did not survive as Puritanism. Cromwell's protectorate, Calvin's Geneva, even Luther's Wittenberg all became more tolerant: the radical concept of individual reform survived the radical furor of their purity. The state of Plymouth Rock and Cotton Mather is now the state of Goodridge v. Department of Public Health.

And so before we take the insistence of the latest talking-head or Eastern Tyrant that the Eastern world is not ready for democracy, that liberal thought and Islam are incompatible, that these protests reveal the deepness of the chasm between us, remember the mirror of history, moving like a mocking, tantalizing shadow — not at all the certain progression of schoolyard Hegel — but a suggestion of historical possibility. And remember the irreducible men like Momani and al-Assadi, our martyrs of indecision. They deserve our deepest recognition.

In other good judicial news, Oregon's Measure 37 (which requires the state to compensate landowners who are hurt by land use regulations) has been exhumed by the Oregon Supreme Court. (A trial court had struck the thing down on very dodgy grounds.) The decision's here.

UPDATE: Tim Sandefur's take on Measure 37 (after the trial court decision but before the Supreme Court ruling) is here.

Incidentally a good, and visionary, article about the application of RFRA to the federal government is Michael Stokes Paulsen, A RFRA Runs Through It: Religious Freedom and The U.S. Code, 56 Mont. L. Rev. 249 (1995), which suggests that in order to keep DOJ from trying to give up on RFRA claims, we ought to put an office of the DOJ's Civil Rights Divisions in charge of enforcing RFRA.

Anyway, the Court's opinion included this passage:

Here the Government’'s argument for uniformity ... rests not so much on the particular statutory program at issue as on slippery-slope concerns that could be invoked in response to any RFRA claim for an exception to a generally applicable law. The Government’s argument echoes the classic rejoinder of bureaucrats throughout history: If I make an exception for you, I’ll have to make one for everybody, so no exceptions.

Part of the problem with the Justice Department's approach to issues of free exercise accommodation is that, viewed in the context of any one particular case, the religious claimant seems, from institutional Government's perspective, to be a crank (or a Trojan Horse hiding cranks to be let loose in the night).

The Supreme Court unanimously (without the participation of Justice Alito) decided today to uphold a preliminary injunction against the government stopping them from using the Controlled Substances Act against the UDV's use of hoasca tea. The source of the injunction is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed in reaction to Employment Division v. Smith, struck down as applied to the states in Boerne v. Flores, but alive and in force once more. In order to enforce a federal law that substantially burdens somebody's religious practice, the federal government has to demonstrate that the enforcement is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest.

And now, after Chief Justice Roberts' opinion in Gonzales v. O Centro, congressional findings of fact about the general evils of schedule 1 drugs and the presence of a treaty do not amount to that compelling state interest. The government actually has to explain why the UDV's consumption of hoasca is so bad.

This may lead the courts to be inundated with religious claimants, and will surely lead to hard calls about what constitutes a religion, what interests are compelling, and so on. But those are hard choices that Congress gets to force upon the judiciary, and the Court's decision seems to me eminently sensible, more so than so many of its decisions in a long time. If this is what we can expect of the Roberts Court, then Hallelujah.