But It Violates A Canon!

I feel like I’m getting ripped off when an expert explaining religion or politics points out how this or that manifestation violates the canon of this or that, as though canons are universal, transcendent, and global rather than post hoc rationalizations for alliances.
The appeal to canons works as a rhetorical move precisely because it sounds neutral. The expert positions herself outside the fray, above the messy business of interest and power, armed with a rulebook. But the rulebook got written by people who had already won certain fights.
Canons in religion are especially good at this. The Council of Nicaea didn’t just settle a theological dispute about the nature of Christ. It settled who got to define orthodoxy going forward, which meant it settled who could call everything else a deviation. The losers didn’t lack canons. They had their own texts, their own councils, their own arguments. They lost politically and militarily, and then they lost canonically, which is the cleaner way to lose because it makes the victory look like it was always already true.
Political canons work the same way, though the timescale compresses. Constitutional originalism is a version of this. The document becomes the standard against which current behavior gets measured, but the interpretation of the document is itself a contest, and whoever controls that interpretation wins without having to argue on the merits. They just point to the text.
What the expert-commentator move does is borrow the authority of the settled canon while hiding the fact that the settlement was itself a power struggle. It says: I am not attacking you politically, I am simply noting that you have failed to meet an objective standard. But the standard didn’t fall from the sky. Someone put it there, and someone benefits from its being there.
The frustrating part is that canons aren’t useless. Institutions need internal standards or they fall apart into pure faction. But that’s different from treating canons as though they were discovered rather than made, as though appealing to them ends the argument rather than relocating it.
This move occurs most often the past 50 years when some scholar tells us that Islamic terror violates the canons of Islam. This rhetoric has a specific political function. It reassures a nervous liberal audience that Islam is not the problem, extremism is the problem, and here is a credentialed Muslim scholar to prove it. The scholar gets to be both insider and referee simultaneously, which is a powerful rhetorical position.
The trouble is that the canon of Islam, like every religious canon, contains multitudes. You can find Quranic verses and hadith that support violence against apostates and unbelievers, and you can find others that forbid it. You can find jurisprudential traditions that authorize jihad in expansive terms, and others that confine it narrowly. The extremists are not simply making things up. They are reading certain texts, certain traditions, certain scholars, and finding genuine support there. The moderate scholar who says they violate the canons is also reading genuinely, but she is reading selectively, as everyone reads selectively, because the canon is large and contradictory enough to support multiple conclusions.
This doesn’t mean the two readings are equivalent in terms of their human consequences. It matters enormously which interpretation gains ground. But it does mean the argument that terror violates Islamic canons is a political argument dressed as a textual one. It is an argument about which reading should win, which scholars should be authoritative, which traditions should be centered. That’s a real argument worth having. It just shouldn’t be disguised as a neutral finding.
There’s also something slightly condescending baked into the whole exercise. The implicit audience is non-Muslim Westerners who need to be reassured, and the implicit message is that the real Islam is the one that fits comfortably within liberal democratic assumptions. The extremists, on this account, are not just wrong but somehow not authentically Muslim. That framing serves Western political needs more than it serves any honest account of what a 1,400-year-old tradition actually contains.