October 10, 2014
by David Solway
Defenders of moderate Islam tie themselves into logical knots.
Thirteen years after 9/11, after some
24,000
terror attacks perpetrated by Muslims since that fateful date, after
the atrocities carried out and still being carried out by
Caliphate-aspiring terrorist militias, after civil wars, incursions, the
mass extermination and eviction of Christian populations in Muslim
lands and territories, hostage-takings, kidnappings, beheadings,
bombings, missile barrages — after all this, many Westerners still
appear to endorse a strict distinction between Islam and Islamism. The
former, we believe or have been led to believe, is a “religion of peace”
whose doctrines have been twisted and misinterpreted by a cadre of
extremists. Islam, according to this perspective, cannot be held
accountable for a band of criminals willfully violating the tenets and
premises of a venerable Abrahamic faith.
The claim is unsustainable. Where it is not advanced disingenuously —
for profit, power or position — it is plainly a function of culpable or
lazy ignorance or, at best, of a desire to be (or to seem) tolerant and
supremely civil. I suspect that the majority of such Western apologists
have not cracked a single page of the Koran or perused even a
scattering of the
ahadith and
sirah,
where the chasm on which they insist between Islam and Islamism is
nowhere to be found. The Koran, in particular, brims with exhortations
to violence against unbelievers, which the 1400-year imperial history of
Islam has honored to the letter. The religious mandate as well as the
empirical practice are undeniably Islamic, not “Islamist” — a concept
that has no meaning in the theological literature.
Far too many of us cannot bring ourselves to understand that the
enemy we are facing is not some fringe minority of “radicals” who are
abusing not only their victims but the principles of the faith they
proclaim. For one thing, the jihadists and their enablers may be a
“minority,” but they number in the millions — the
lowball figure of 1% of the
ummah yields 15-16 million; a
not unreasonable estimate
of 10% gives 150-160 million. Any way you look at it, that’s a lot of
people determined to kill you. When one considers that this number
amounts to half the population of the United States out for one’s blood,
it puts the issue into perspective. For another thing, the
shahids and
mujahidin
know perfectly well how to read their sacred texts, far better than
their victims, dupes, extenuators and fellow-travelers who neglect to
study either the scriptures or the history of Islam in order to gain a
more acute and comprehensive knowledge of the enemy who plots their
destruction. Others, of course, have been bought, suborned by donations
or bribes and subsidized by petrodollars, or they are trimmers who have
capitalized on business interests and opportunities.
Even those who have grasped the pitiless and bellicose quality of
Islamic law and normative doctrine, and, moreover, have suffered
terrible losses at the hands of “the believers” will, often from the
noblest of motives, insist on distinguishing between the unoffending and
the barbarous members of the faith. George Reisman, whose son was among
the 2,296 innocents massacred on 9/11, delivered a lambent and
courageous
tenth anniversary speech
in which he proudly declared himself an Islamophobe and excoriated the
“medieval” savagery of his son’s murderers. Yet he assures us that his
“hatred of Radical Islam does not extend to every Muslim as an
individual. It does extend, however, to Islam as an institution.” Nor
does his condemnation extend “to those brave souls who are struggling to
bring Islam into the 21
rst Century sensibilities.” These exceptions aside, he is clear about his “abhorrence of the 7
th Century brand of Islam that the Radicals want to impose upon us and the rest of the world.”
The term “7
th Century,” as employed here, is not
exclusively historical but operates as shorthand for a primitive and
barbaric mindset. The real problem, however — and it may well be
insuperable — is that what we call “7
th Century Islam” is a 21
rst century
resident, inherent in the texts, judgments, precepts, usages and
ceremonies followed by all believing Muslims. The distinction Reisman
introduces between 7
th century radicalism and the institution of Islam
per se is redundant.
Authentic Islam has always been a “7
th
Century” religion insofar as the harsh, legalistic and invasive spirit
that animates its founding documents has remained intact to the present
day. As the great historian Jacob Burckhardt
observed,
Islam “spread not by mission but by conquests.” This is how it differs
from the other two Abrahamic faiths, which, for that matter, date prior
to the 7
th century. Judaism does not actively seek converts
and Christianity is intrinsically a missionary religion; moreover, the
indwelling spirit that vitalizes them is universal and their congregants
have for the most part adapted to the modern world.
There really is no comparison.
Authentic Judaism is defined by the Decalogue and the
Noahide Laws,
which value human life, prohibit murder, and command us to establish a
just and humane social order extending to all mankind.
Authentic
Christianity is a religion of mercy that renders unto God what is God’s
and unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, with only a sparse handful of jarring
or dissonant moments.
The fact that Islam, deriving from the
preachments and practices of Allah’s Messenger, does not share these
characteristics with Judaism and Christianity but is almost uniformly
aggressive, severe and vindictive in its punitive austerities, is one
that too few of us are willing to recognize, owing to a reluctance to
appear “racist,” bigoted or illiberal.
Individuals will always betray or deviate from the austere or exalted
temper of their scriptures where these enshrine the Golden Rule —
Kierkegaard’s wise distinction between Christianity and Christendom. The
difference in this connection is that what we would regard as
“deviation” — cruelty, oppression, the call to perpetual warfare — is in
Islam not a function of individual or group delinquency but is actually
intrinsic to the incunabula of Islam and ubiquitous throughout the
founding library of the faith. “People ask whether Islam can undergo a
reformation like the one that Christianity underwent. That’s a poor
parallel,” writes Canadian ex-Muslim Ali Sina in his seminal volume
Understanding Muhammad and Muslims.
In Christianity, it wasn’t the religion that needed to be
reformed, but the church; what Jesus preached was good.…In Islam, it’s
the religion that is not good.
In other words, a lapsed Church is foreign to essential Christianity
and a corrupt Temple is alien to essential Judaism. But such regressions
are actually integral to Islam, bred in the unabrogated scriptures
which permit, approve and ratify such depravities as slavery, child
marriage, polygamy, gynophobia, deception (
taqiyya), the breaking
of treaties, the doctrinally sanctioned acquisition of booty and of
women as the spoils of war, dhimmitude and, most terrible of all, wanton
slaughter of unbelievers. As Koran 8:39 commands, “Make war on them
until idolatry is no more and Allah’s religion reigns supreme.” It is
not difficult, then, to see that ancestral Islam is demonstrably
contemporary Islam since the Koran is understood to be an eternal book,
coterminous with Allah, and thus does not allow for revision.
Further, critics of Islam who wish to spare the individual
communicant, commendable as their attempt at fair-mindedness may be, are
caught in a contradiction. In separating the
institution of the faith, which they denounce, from peaceable and decent
individual Muslims, whom they profess to applaud — even
Geert Wilders has taken this route
— they succeed only in undermining their own argument. Who or what can a
“good” or moderate Muslim possibly be if he or she has no connection
with or relation to the institution — the structure, practice, canons
and prescripts — of the very faith from which he or she is said to be
divorced? There is a blatant conundrum of identity at work here, which
our charitable detractors apparently refuse to countenance or explain.
Can there be such a chimera as a “Muslim” absent the institution of
Islam? What is left but an empty jalabiya?
Muslims must be equally conflicted. Raheel Raza, whose film
Honour Diaries decries
some of the worst practices of her co-religionists, remains a pious
Muslim who is comforted and nourished by her faith. What, we may ask,
defines that merciful and solacing faith for her if it is based on the
Koran, the a
hadith, the
sirah, the
shariah and the
diverse schools of a grim and stringent jurisprudence governing every
detail of quotidian life? And if it is not predicated on authoritative
Islam, what can possibly be left over from so aliquant a commitment
except a few abrogated tropes and a number of rituals and customs?
Perhaps it is a private faith she is espousing, but a private faith is
not a religion and does not merit a historical name.
The noted Islamic scholiast Salim Mansur lobbies in his 2011 book
Delectable Lie
for an end to or reduction of Muslim immigration to Canada, which he
sees as disruptive of social harmony and democratic principles. Yet he
is contemptuous of renowned and honest critics of Islam like Robert
Spencer and Andrew Bostom, and cleaves to what he regards as the true
core of Islam (personal communication). The question immediately
presents itself: what is the true core of Islam? How much cherry-picking
must one diligently perform in the orchard of the sacred text to arrive
at the real Islam? How high up the cherry tree must one’s ladder climb?
Mansur is surely teetering. “How great the distance is now,” he laments
in an obsequious
article for the
Wall Street Journal,
“between many of those who wear the mantle of Islam and the message
Muhammad delivered.” The distance this expert mourns, as we have seen,
is too negligible to be measured. The larger, Medinan portion of the
Koran consists to an alarming extent of messages that would make any
harbi (non-Muslim living in a country not subject to Islam) or apostate fear for his safety, freedom and very existence.
Mansur strains to justify his faith by quoting an enigmatic if not utterly baffling
hadith in
which the Prophet himself supposedly deplores those who will violate
his message: “Islam began as a stranger and will become once more a
stranger.” The trouble is that, according to
Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, 1/130, among a chain of transmissions, Muhammad concludes by saying, “so blessed are the strangers.” This
hadith, narrated by
Abu Hurairah,
an early companion of Muhammad, is best left to its obscurity since it
only confuses Mansur’s redemptive folly as well as the reader he is
laboring to seduce. Mansur’s predicament is an unenviable one, shared by
all like him who try to rinse the mantle of its indelible blemishes.
When you have thoroughly bowdlerized the historical muniments and
expurgated the near-entirety of the theological, political, legal,
philosophical and narrative foundations of the faith, what remains to
inspire one’s devotion except an embarrassing caricature or, at best, a
beautiful fiction?
One thinks of other pacifist, socially conscious and highly
intellectual Muslims like Tarek Fatah, Irshad Manji, Zuhdi Jasser and
the Ahmadi
Qasim Rashid,*
contorting themselves into conciliatory knots to justify their
continued loyalty to that which stubbornly resists explicative
laundering. They cannot admit that al-Qaeda, ISIS and similar terrorist
outfits are the pure, Koran-abiding communicants of the faith they
persist in trying to salvage. Where this leaves the Western critic of
Islam who condemns the faith but extols the enlightened Muslim
individual, or the devout Muslim who eschews violence,
shariah,
the supremacist impulse and the rebarbative dictates of scripture defies
all the postulates of rational thinking. One cannot help but contrast
former Muslims like Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Walid Shoebat, Ali
Sina, Nonie Darwish and Wafa Sultan who, at great personal risk, did the
myth, so to speak, and followed their consciences.
* – The Ahmadis derive their version of Islam from the
teachings of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who believed he was appointed by God to
disinter the true message of Muhammad from the darkness into which it
had fallen; he is therefore a problematic spokesperson for mainstream
Islam, whether of the Sunni or Shia variety.
At the same time, we must be extremely wary of the proliferating
Muslim and pro-Muslim Internet sites that torture the statistics and
play havoc with the facts, citing problematic and deeply compromised
sources, or rewriting them partially or wholesale. To take a salient
instance,
The American Muslim
brazenly claims that in the period 1980-2005, “most terrorist incidents
were not caused by Muslims,” that since Obama’s 2008 election,
non-Muslim terror plots outnumber Muslim terror plots by a ratio of 25
to 9, that “the overwhelming number of attacks carried out in [Europe
were] linked to separatism” (a claim which also and disingenuously
discounts the
magnitude of such attacks, where one Madrid
commuter train bombing is worth thousands of fender benders, verbal
insults, broken windows and torched outhouses), that Israeli PM
Netanyahu and likeminded Israelis are proponents of “radical Judaism”
and are “motivated by the extremely violent verses” of the Old Testament
— among a swollen farrago of outright canards, shameless lies, bizarre
adductions and selective quoting from tainted documents.
Loonwatch,
another of these adulterated sites, assures us that 94% of Muslims are
neither perpetrators nor supporters of terror; be that as it may, that
still leaves by its accounting some 90-96 million who are. Not exactly a
consolation. Loonwatch also informs us that Jewish acts of terrorism in
the U.S. exceeded Islamic terror strikes. From its point of view,
summer is obviously colder than winter.
Both these disinformative sites like to quote dubious and far left
venues like the Southern Poverty Law Center, among the most toxic and
mendacious of “progressivist” activist organizations. But the FBI
database is a particular favorite. This is the same FBI whose training
manual has recently been purged of all references to Islam and jihad,
that has no viable definition of what constitutes a terrorist act —
indeed, its net is so wide that almost any tremor or molestation can
qualify, that declares that
nearly half (42%)
of indigenous terrorist activities originate in the Latino community,
that thoroughly botched its surveillance of the 9/11 terrorists, and
that, in any event, is “
unleashed and unaccountable.”
These sites also like to go back to 1980 as a starting point, thirteen
years before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and twenty-one years
before 9/11, when Muslim-inspired terror attacks were not yet in full
flower. This is either incompetence, political correctness or
taqiyya with a vengeance.
We can no longer temporize and procrastinate. We need to wake up to
reality before reality buries us in civilizational desuetude. As Sina
asks, “How rational is it to let a belief system thrive in our countries
when the very tenets of that belief are intolerant of ours and call for
our subjugation?” The fact is, radical Islam
is Islam, whose war
against the West is transacted through the twin instruments of violence
and infiltration, the latter a generally unacknowledged but even more
effective form of terrorism. Merely remark the ruined neighborhoods,
boroughs and suburbs of towns and cities in both Europe and America
where Muslim immigration and mosque construction have gone unhindered.
Standard Islam is a war machine, an invading army with multiple
techniques and weapons at its disposal. This is why Sina can logically
state that “there are no extremists in Islam.” Terror, however we define
it, is a genuine expression of Islam: The steeds of war gallop out of
the Koran to terrify the enemy of Allah (see Koran 8:60). “Islamism” is a
figment of weak or frightened, naive or complicit minds, endorsing by
misdirection what Andy Bostom
describes
as “the profound moral pathology at the very heart and soul of
mainstream, institutional Islam.” One cannot escape the conclusion that
those who defend Islam or who struggle valiantly but fruitlessly to
rehabilitate it are living in a state of cognitive dissonance.
Countering
the pabulum of American presidential farceurs Barack Obama, Bill
Clinton and George W. Bush (and the equally mealy-mouthed claptrap of
British PM David Cameron) that the conduct of Muslim terrorists is “not
Islamic,” Daniel Pipes, who has in the past dined out on the theoretical
distinction between radical and moderate Muslims, appears to have come
to his senses. Pipes avers that “anyone with eyes and ears realizes that
ISIS, like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda before it, is 100 percent Islamic.”
Nota bene: Islamic, not Islamist.
A former Muslim who goes by the pseudonym of
Brother Rachid
is even more emphatic: the terrorist franchises are marching in
lockstep with the Prophet, their every abomination sanctioned by a
command in the Koran, a passage in the
ahadith, and an example in the
sirah.
They live in a veritable reverie of slaughter and conquest and thus
fulfill what they conceive as a pledge and a duty. They are attending to
the text. And in so doing, they also march in lockstep with their
covert accomplices, namely, the asylum seekers, the refugee streams, the
vast number of residential immigrants, the “re-united” families (often
consisting of
multiple wives masquerading as relatives and eligible for welfare), the firebrand imams and
dawah-spouting
preachers, the second-generation, born-again jihadists, and the
pitiable revisionists who strive to re-interpret and redeem what is
constitutively resistant to their efforts, yet cannot extricate
themselves from the snare of creedal affirmation. There is much truth to
Burckhardt’s observation that “obedience to a non-Islamic dispensation
could never be enforced.”
Perhaps Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has
said it best: “There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.” “Islamism” is a
Fata Morgana,
a conceptual mirage that beckons in a mental desert. Erdogan’s slogan
merits repeating, its content worth absorbing. Islam is Islam and that’s
it.
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