THERE ARE A NUMBER of serious moral problems within the Muslim world: the lack of liberty, the treatment of women, the imposition of Sharia on Muslims and non-Muslims, the use of violent punishments for non-violent offenses, and an abandonment of reason, among others. Any one of these would seem to disqualify Islamism—meaning Sharia-based society, the traditional Islamic ideal—as a solution, let alone the best solution, to the problem of evil.
1. Islam and Liberty
LET’S BEGIN WITH LIBERTY, the central value of the American value system. Individual liberty as understood in the West has never been an important value in the Muslim world—or, for that matter, almost anywhere else (outside of England) before the American Revolution. But it is not important within Islam today either. One result is that there are essentially no free Muslim countries.1
Of the forty-seven Muslim-majority countries, the Freedom House 2010 survey ranked two as free, eighteen partly free, and twenty-seven not free.
How is one to explain this?
There are three widely offered exculpating explanations. One is that outside of Western civilization, liberty has not been a primary value in almost any culture. Another is that Muslim countries were colonized by Western nations and therefore stymied in their development. And a third is that, particularly in the Arab part of the Muslim world, many features of Bedouin Arab life remain strong.
Even if valid, none of these explanations recommends Sharia-based Islam to those who seek liberty. But they are not valid. Regarding the lack of liberty outside the Western world, that was true until the modern era. But there are many non-Western societies that have embraced liberty—certainly to a greater extent than the Muslim world has. As regards the vestiges of pre-Islamic culture in Arab-Muslim society and culture, isn’t the primary goal of religion to improve on the moral culture it replaced? If Jews had many of the same moral values and practices that Canaanites had, one would speak of Judaism as having failed morally. If Christendom still retained the practices and values of the Roman Empire, what possible moral argument could be made on behalf of Christianity? As for Arab and other Muslim countries having been colonized by the West, India, too, was colonized and ruled by British imperialists—and emerged a robust democracy. More on this later.
That liberty has been absent in the Arab part of the Muslim world demands further explanation. No part of the Muslim world is as steeped in Islam as is the Arab. Muhammad was Arab, the Arabs spread Islam, the Koran is in Arabic, the Muslim holy sites are in Arabia, and every Muslim is expected to make a pilgrimage to Arabia. Why, then, has the Arab world, which has been Muslim longer than any other part of the Muslim world, been the least free?
According to many observers of the Middle East, the lack of liberty in the Arab world begins in the Arab family. In the words of Brian Whitaker, Middle East editor for the Guardian, “To understand Arab society, and indeed its politics, we have to understand Arab concepts of the family. The family is the basic molecule of society and, in many ways, a microcosm of the Arab state. It is the primary mechanism for social control—or, put another way, the point where liberty begins to be constrained.”2
This view is affirmed by an Arab sociologist: “Rulers and political leaders,” Halim Barakat says, “are cast in the image of the father, while citizens are cast in the image of children. God, the father, and the ruler thus have many characteristics in common. They are the shepherds, and the people are the sheep: citizens of Arab countries are often referred to as ra’iyyah (the flock).”3
Moreover, it is not only a lack of individual liberty that characterizes the Arab world. The Arab Human Development Report of 2003, written by Arab scholars and published by the United Nations Development Programme, was devastating in its description of Arab countries.
Take, for example, their lack of interest in the non-Muslim world: “The total number of books translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years is fewer than those translated in Spain in one year. Greece, with a population of fewer than 11 million, translates five times as many books from abroad into Greek annually as the 22 Arab countries combined, with a total population of more than 300 million, translated into Arabic.”4
In addition, “Of the Arab League’s 22 members, not a single one is a stable and fully fledged democracy…. Even sub-Saharan Africa has a better record of electoral freedom.”5
It is difficult to avoid concluding that Islam is a cause of the Arab world’s backwardness. As Professor Samuel Huntington put it when interviewed in an Islamic magazine—proving, one should note, that many Muslims are quite capable of handling critical comments—“Islamic culture explains, in large part, the failure of democracy to emerge in much of the Muslim world.”6
At worst, it is the primary cause. At best, it has done little in over a thousand years to elevate the Arab world.
2. Islam and Violence
EVERY RELIGION, every culture, every ethnic group, and every nation has engaged in violence. Islam is hardly alone in this regard. However, among major world religions, Islam has stood out. Islam’s origins are more violent than those of the two other monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity.
After the Jews conquered Canaan following the exodus from Egypt in about 1200 BC, the early Jewish kingdoms were involved in wars with other nations—and fought each other. But they never sought to increase their numbers through conquest, and did not seek to convert those they conquered or establish Jewish hegemony beyond the limited biblical borders. Judaism always welcomed converts, but unlike Muslims and Christians, Jews were under no theological compulsion to make converts. There was, therefore, nothing analogous within Judaism to Islam’s conquering vast numbers of non-Muslims and converting them.
As for Christianity, the violence that accompanied Christianity’s origins was directed against Christians, not committed by Christians, who constituted a small and weak minority in the Roman Empire. It took more than three hundred years—after the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as the state religion—for Christians to begin to wage war.
Beyond Islam’s first few members, its original converts were largely converted through warfare. Until stopped by hostile forces centuries later, Islam never ceased conquering new areas to spread Islam.
When confronted with the violence perpetrated in spreading Islam, a favored response offered by defenders of Islam is to cite the verse in the Koran that says, “In matters of faith there shall be no compulsion” (Sura 2:256). This verse is of particular significance to defenders of Islam because it provides a Koranic basis for arguing that Islam forbids religious violence and because it suggests that Islam was not allowed to accept forced conversions.
In response, one would point out that there are approximately a hundred verses in the Koran that direct the Muslim in the other direction. Some examples:
“If anyone desires a religion other than Islam, never will it be accepted of him.”
(Sura 3:85)
“I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”
(Sura 8:12)
“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth…”
(Sura 9:29)
“O you who believe! Fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you firmness.”
(Sura 9:123)
These verses are not cited to judge the Koran. They are cited to counter the argument that the verse that promotes religious tolerance is representative of the Koran.
Moreover, the issue here is not what any given verse in the Koran advocates. It is what Muslims did in the name of Islam.
Verses are open to interpretation; historical facts are not. Either many millions of non-Muslims were killed in spreading Islam, and either vast numbers of non-Muslims were given a choice of Islam or death, or not. Arguing that a Koranic verse advocating religious tolerance means that Islam was not often spread by the sword is analogous to arguing that because Jesus advocated loving one’s enemies, the Church never persecuted anyone. In Muhammad’s lifetime, the Arabian Peninsula became Muslim. After his death in 632:
Persia was conquered between 633 and 651.
Syria in 636–37.
Armenia in 639.
Egypt in 639.
The rest of North Africa between 652 and 665.
Cyprus in 654.
Central Asia (modern-day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and part of Kazakhstan) between 662 and 709.
India beginning in 664–712.
Iberia (modern-day Spain and Portugal) between 711 and 718.
Constantinople (modern-day Turkey) by 718.
Georgia in 736.
Crete in 820.
Southern Italy in 827.
From its inception, Islam went to war to conquer and convert people in countries from the Atlantic Ocean to Western China. As Muhammad said in what is called his farewell address, “I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no God but Allah.’”
In the words of a leading scholar of Islam, Professor Efraim Karsh of the University of London: “Within a decade of Muhammad’s death a vast empire, stretching from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to northern Syria, had come into being under the banner of Islam in one of the most remarkable examples of empire-building in world history.”7
It is also worth noting these wars were rarely, if ever, defensive wars. None of the conquered countries threatened Muslim Arabia. The purpose was to bring mankind to Islam.
Does this mean that Islam is inherently violent? Religions can evolve, and a religious Muslim can, if he chooses to, find in the Koran a basis for tolerance and nonviolence. But from its inception until the present, Islam has been violent, and traditionally religious Muslims believed that their religion countenanced that violence.
If a movement engages in violence for much of its 1,500-year history, if that violence is rarely in defense of self or of others, and if there are few recorded instances of voices from within that movement objecting to that violence, it would seem fair to deem that movement violent, though not inevitably so.
The leading Muslim theological and scholarly voices that are recorded sanctioned religious violence. Indeed, the Muslim success in conquering, killing, and enslaving of non-Muslims—specifically those who were neither Jews nor Christians—was deemed to be proof of God’s approval of the killing and enslavement, and of course, of Islam.
To argue that Islam is inherently peaceful and tolerant, one would have to argue that most believing Muslims, including, especially, its most knowledgeable and most pious, from Muhammad’s time forward, were violating their religion’s basic tenets.
JIHAD
At the core of Islam’s acceptance and prescription of religious violence is jihad, Islam’s most distinguishing violent feature. Jihad is the Muslim term for holy war. Contemporary apologists for Islam argue that jihad can also mean struggle with oneself to become a better human being. That is true. But it is dishonest to argue that the latter definition has been the dominant one in Muslim history. Princeton University professor Bernard Lewis, generally considered, in the words of CNN and Newsweek commentator Fareed Zakaria, “the pre-eminent historian of Islam,”8 has written that in the large majority of cases in the Koran and the later hadith (actions or statements attributed to Muhammad’s doing or approving) jihad refers to holy war.9
Arguably the most important statement about holy war’s central place in Islam was made by the man who is the most highly esteemed Muslim thinker to have ever lived, Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406). The work for which Ibn Khaldun is best known is The Muqaddimah, or “Introduction to History.” This work was declared by the eminent Oxford historian Arnold Toynbee as “the greatest work of its kind that has ever been created by any mind in any time or place…. The most comprehensive and illuminating analysis of however human affairs work that has been made anywhere.” It has been published in English as one of Princeton University’s Bollingen Series of world classics. In this work, Ibn Khaldun wrote, “In the Muslim community, the holy war is religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.”10
The most respected Muslim writer who ever lived is not only not apologetic about the fact that Islam demands holy war; he argues that this is one reason for Islam’s superiority over all other religions: “The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty to them, save only for purposes of defense.”
So, according to Ibn Khaldun:
a. Unlike all other religions, which demand war only in self-defense,
b. Islam demands jihad, holy war,
c. Muslims are therefore enjoined to wage jihad in order to make converts to Islam.
Even if one accepts that there are multiple meanings of the term jihad, and that other meanings can be moral and ennobling, that would have no bearing on the question of whether jihad as holy war is central to Islam. As Ibn Khaldun makes clear, jihad, meaning a holy war of aggression just as much as a holy war of defense, is central to Islam, and is Islam’s distinguishing glory.
This does not mean that every believing Muslim today advocates jihad in order to make converts. Nor does it mean that every Muslim who supports jihad necessarily supports Islamist terror. Jihad is supported by all Muslim supporters of terror, but terror is not necessarily supported by every supporter of jihad. But violence in the name of Islam, whether for secular reasons such as acquiring power, wealth, and slaves, or in order to make converts to Islam—or, as was usually the case, for both—has been a normative part of Muslim history.
ISLAM AND TERROR
As of the second decade in the twenty-first century, nearly all acts of terror around the world (as opposed to acts of terror confined to one country, as in the case of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka) have been committed by Muslims in the name of Islam. Of course the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists. But this frequently noted fact is meaningless. The vast majority of Germans were not members of the Gestapo, nor were the vast majority of Russians members of the Communist Party, let alone the KGB.
Not only is international terror overwhelmingly Muslim, but there are virtually no terrorists committing terror in the name of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or any other religion. Here is a typical Islamist act of terror that has no analogue in other religions: “In November 1997, 50 Swiss tourists rose early to visit the Valley of the Kings across the Nile from Luxor in Egypt. Suddenly from the hills came a group of Islamists. They shot, disemboweled and decapitated the tourists.”11
No normative critic, conservative or otherwise, equates Islamic terrorism with all Muslims or with all of Islam. Rather, in Charles Krauthammer’s words, “Radical Islam is not, by any means, a majority of Islam. But with its financiers, clerics, propagandists, trainers, leaders, operatives and sympathizers—according to a conservative estimate, it commands the allegiance of 7 percent of Muslims, that is, more than 80 million souls—it is a very powerful strain within Islam. It has changed the course of nations and affected the lives of millions. It is the reason every airport in the West is an armed camp and every land is on constant alert.”12
One frequently offered explanation for Islamic terror is that countries and groups that have been attacked by Muslim terrorists have brought those attacks upon themselves. Those who offer this explanation always add that they do not condone terrorism; they are merely explaining it. This explanation is offered most often regarding terror against the United States and Israel. In the case of Israel, however, there is a particularly telling argument against this explanation. According to the 2009 CIA World Factbook, about 8 percent of Palestinians—about 167,000 people—living in the West Bank were Christian. If Israeli occupation, rather than something within Islam, has been the primary reason for Palestinian terror against Israel, why haven’t there been Palestinian Christian suicide terrorists? After all, Christian Palestinians are no less occupied by Israel.
Some counter that there have been Palestinian Christian terrorists, that in fact the “godfather” of Palestinian terrorism, George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was a Christian. It is true that Habash was born a Christian, a faith he left when he became a Marxist, but he never went, and he never sent any Palestinians, on a suicide terror mission. As Time magazine put it when Habash died in 2008, “compared to the terrorists behind today’s nihilistic suicide bombings and mass atrocities such as 9/11, Habash’s commandos were almost softies. Before they blew up the three planes in Jordan in a spectacular, televised moment that was the 9/11 of its day, all of the 300 or so passengers were evacuated and quickly freed.”13
The reason that Palestinian terror has been perpetrated by Muslim rather than Christian Palestinians seems clear. There is Palestinian Muslim terror largely for the same reasons there is non-Palestinian Muslim terror. A significant part of the Muslim world wishes to destroy those non-Muslims—Americans, Israelis, Filipinos, Nigerians, Sudanese, Christian Lebanese, and others—who prevent Islam from attaining power.
Muslim terror is caused by Muslims, not by the non-Muslims against whom it has been directed. In our morally confused world, Israel and America—and other victims of terror such as Spain, even after that country’s socialists came to power promising to remove Spain’s troops from Iraq—are often deemed largely responsible for having their men, women, and children blown up.
One of the most often asked questions posed after America was attacked on 9/11 was, “What has the United States done to arouse so much Muslim hatred?” The question, however, is on the same moral level as asking what German and other European Jews did to cause the Holocaust, or what blacks did to arouse the hatred among the American whites who lynched them.
The primary cause of Muslim terror is to be found within the Muslims who conduct the acts of terror and the Muslims who support them—not within the behavior of the victims or the victims’ groups. What did the above-mentioned tourists in Egypt or their country (Switzerland) do to merit their being slaughtered?
As for terror against Israelis, Palestinian Muslim terror emanates from a desire to destroy Israel, not from Israel’s conduct regarding Palestinians, whether occupation, settlements, or checkpoints. One proof is that the greatest amount of Palestinian terror against Israel was unleashed after Israel agreed to give up nearly all of the West Bank to the Palestinians at the end of 2000. Islamist terror against Israel is the result of Muslim, especially Arab Muslim, desires to annihilate the one non-Muslim state in the midst of the Arab world. For most Arab Muslims and for all Islamists, the Middle East is supposed to be under Muslim rule. There is no place for a Christian Lebanon or for a Jewish Israel, no matter what its borders. That Israel is Jewish is all the more an affront to many Muslims. Jews are supposed to have dhimmi status under Muslim rule, and no Muslim should be under Jewish rule.
Islamist terror in Algeria in the 1990s provides an important example of what Islamists will do to in order to install an Islamist regime in a country and of their willingness to murder fellow Muslims in order to achieve their goals. Islamist terrorists killed approximately one hundred thousand and injured approximately one million Algerians, nearly always innocent men, women, and children. Led by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) of the Algerian Islamic Movement (MIA), the intention was to create an Islamist regime in Algeria. Here is a summary in a monograph sponsored by the Norwegian government, written by Algerian journalist M. Boudjemaa of the Algerian newspaper Quotidien d’Oran:
It is a movement that is genocidal in character, with no equivalent in Africa or the world, except perhaps the disastrous toll of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. A religious political movement, whose roots go deep down into the contemporary history of Algeria since independence, embodies this terrorist violence….
Between 1992 and 1997, the GIA conducted a series of violent campaigns against an unarmed population and a security service that had never faced such a phenomenon. Their actions included bombings, purposeful criminal acts, the massacre of isolated citizens, sabotage, rape, mutilation, torture and the systematic liquidation of any Algerian citizen who refused to support the extremist fundamentalist solution….
Through the assassination of foreigners, the terrorists have also targeted women and men of religions other than Islam, even those that preach tolerance and forgiveness. Catholics, Protestants, both monks (seven of whom belonged to the Trappist Order) and high dignitaries of the church, have been killed, such as Bishop Claverie, who was killed in a bomb attack in Oran in August 1995.14
MUSLIM ATTITUDES TOWARD TERROR
Many polls have been taken of Muslims living in Muslim countries and in the West. The polls reveal that at least 10 percent—and often far more—support Islamic terrorism. That would mean that, conservatively speaking, well over 100 million Muslims support suicide terror under various circumstances.
The polls also indicated that support for suicide bombings declined in various Muslim countries after 2002. If this is accurate, it is likely that the reason for the decline was the vast increase in suicide bombings directed against Muslims themselves, as opposed to earlier years when such acts of terrorism were directed primarily against non-Muslims, especially Americans and Israelis.
As of this writing, however, I could find no credible report of any significant Muslim demonstration against Islamic terrorism against non-Muslims anywhere in the world. The only major Muslim demonstration against Muslim terror that I could find took place in November 2005 in Jordan.
On November 9, 2005, there was a series of coordinated terrorist suicide bomber attacks on three hotels in Amman, Jordan. The attacks killed sixty people and injured 115 others. One of the attacks was during a wedding celebration and it killed the fathers of both the bride and the groom. Jordanians were so shocked that Muslim terrorists would blow up Jordanian families, including families celebrating a wedding, that Muslims publicly demonstrated against Islamic terror.
As long as Islamic terrorists blew up men, women, and children who were Jewish, Christian, Hindu, American, Australian, and black Sudanese, among others, there were no public protests in the Arab and larger Muslim worlds. In fact, Palestinians, who compose the majority of Jordan’s population, celebrated when Jews were blown up at Passover seders and night clubs. And some took to the streets and cheered in the Palestinian fashion, handing out candy, when Americans were massacred on September 11, 2001.
There was widespread Jordanian condemnation of the man responsible for the Amman attack, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who headed Al Qaeda in Iraq. The London Telegraph, for example, reported that “Munder Moomeni, a 38-year-old former soldier who lives next to Zarqawi’s house, 13 Ramzi Street, described his former neighbour as ‘a bastard.’ ‘By killing Jordanians here in Jordan, civilian Jordanians going to a wedding, they did something that not even a Jew would do,’ he said.”15
That a neighbor in Zarqawi’s formerly sympathetic hometown publicly acknowledged that Jews would not engage in such terror was significant. But over time the only real lesson learned was that Jordanian terrorists should not bomb fellow Jordanians.
3. Islam and Non-Muslims
FROM ISLAM’S INCEPTION, Muslims invaded every area of the world they could in order to conquer and/or convert the non-Muslims living there. There were rarely moral restraints on the treatment of those conquered; the conquering Muslims believed that non-Muslims (who were not Jews or Christians), that is, “nonbelievers,” did not deserve to live. Therefore, in many cases they were given the choice of Islam or death, and in other cases they were either killed or enslaved. As a result, the number of non-Muslims killed in the name of Islam was in the tens of millions.
HINDUS
The largest number of these victims were Hindus. In 712 CE,* Muslims invaded India after conquering Persia and with the invasion by Mahmoud of Ghazni some three hundred years later, ultimately controlled much of the Indian subcontinent until about the middle of the eighteenth century—a period of approximately a thousand years. According to historian Will Durant, “The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history.”16
In the world prior to Communism and Nazism, Durant may have been right. In 1973, Indian professor K. S. Lal published Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India (1000–1800), in which he concluded that between 60 and 80 million Hindus died as a result of the Muslim invasions and rule over India in the years between 1000 and 1525.* That number cannot be precisely verified given the paucity of documents from that time and place. However, Lal (1920–2002) was widely regarded both within and outside India as the preeminent historian of medieval India. He was professor of history at the University of Delhi and the chairman of the Indian Council for Historical Research.
Reading the descriptions of the Muslim invasions of Hindu areas over a thousand years and the genocidal killings involved, Lal’s estimate and Durant’s description seem plausible. There is also another—Muslim-based—argument that an enormous number of Hindu deaths occurred under Islamic conquest and rule. The Hindu Kush, the vast, 500-mile long, 150-mile wide mountain range stretching from Afghanistan to Pakistan, was populated by Hindus until the Muslim invasions beginning around 1000 CE. The Persian name Hindu Kush was proudly given by Muslims. It means “Hindu killer.”
JEWS AND CHRISTIANS
Unlike Hindus or any of the other peoples conquered by Muslims, Jews and Christians had a special status in Islamic theology. Though they were often killed, mass killings of Jews and Christians were not common once Islamic rule was established. According to Islamic theology, Jews and Christians, being People of the Book (that is, the Old and New Testaments) were not to be slaughtered, but allowed to live under special rules.
Thus, Christians remained a large part of the North African countries ruled by Muslims since the seventh century. It was not until the fourteenth century—beginning in 1321, when Muslim mobs began destroying Coptic churches—that Christians and Jews in Egypt were killed in any numbers. In 1354, mobs were “attacking Christians and Jews in the streets, and throwing them into bonfires if they refused to pronounce the shahadatayn [Allah is the one true God and Muhammad is his messenger].”17 By the end of that century, according to the contemporary Arab historian Muhammad al-Maqrizi (1364–1442): “[In] all the provinces of Egypt, both north and south, no church remained that had not been razed…. thus did Islam spread among the Christians of Egypt.”18
Islam’s view of the Jews emanating from Muhammad and the Koran were never favorable, and this led to harsh treatment of Jews, though rarely as harsh as the treatment Jews often experienced in Christian Europe. That fact, as we shall see, influenced the way major Western writers wrote about Muslim treatment of Christians and particularly of Jews.
Anti-Jewish sentiments began with Muhammad and the Koran and those origins have been cited to this day by Muslims as justification for maltreating Jews. Muhammad wanted the Jews of his time to accept him as God’s final and authoritative prophet and to accept the Koran as the final divine revelation. Muhammad wanted all people to accept him and the Koran, but, as with Jesus six hundred years before, Jewish acclamation was more important than that of any other group. As Joseph Telushkin and I have written, “No group could validate Muhammad’s religious claims as could the Jews, nor could any so seriously threaten to undermine them.”19
Muhammad was deeply influenced by Judaism and the Torah, so much so that from the beginning of his prophetic vocation, he “had been trying to model the religious life of the ummah [Islamic community] on Judaism.”20 He originally fasted on the Jewish high holy day of Yom Kippur, he prayed toward Jerusalem, he modeled Islam’s five-times-daily prayers after Judaism’s three-times-daily prayers, and he made the Muslim version of the Jewish Sabbath on Fridays. After he gave up on the Jews accepting him as their prophet, he changed the Muslim fast from Yom Kippur to Ramadan and changed the direction of Muslim prayers from Jerusalem to Mecca.
As an eminent scholar of Jewish life under Islam, the late professor S. D. Goitein, founder of Hebrew University’s School of Asian and African Studies, wrote: “It is only natural that Muhammad could not tolerate as a neighbor a large monotheistic community which categorically denied his claim as a prophet, and probably also ridiculed his inevitable blunders.”21 Therefore, alongside acknowledgment of the Jews having a special place in the divine scheme, of Moses as a Muslim prophet, and some other shared biblical beliefs, the Jews’ rejection caused Muhammad to include severe accusations against the Jews in the Koran. Here is a sampling:
“O you who believe! Do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends [some translations say “allies”]; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people.”
(Sura 5:51)
“Verily, you will find the Jews the greediest of mankind for life and even greedier than those who ascribe partners [other gods] to Allah.”
(Sura 2:96)
“Those Jews who incurred the Curse of Allah and His Wrath, some of whom He has transformed into monkeys and swine…”
(Sura 5:60)
“And the Jews say: The hand of Allah is tied up! Their hands shall be shackled and they shall be cursed for what they say.”
(Sura 5:64)
“And abasement and humiliation were brought down upon them, and they became deserving of Allah’s wrath; this was so because they disbelieved in the communications of Allah and killed the prophets unjustly; this was so because they disobeyed and exceeded the limits.”
(Sura 2:61)
The guiding principle of Islam’s treatment of Jews and Christians has been that Islam dominates and is not dominated. Therefore, while other non-Muslims were to be killed, enslaved, or converted, Jews and Christians were to be subservient and degraded.22
It is often argued that there was a golden age of Muslim tolerance (of Jews and Christians) between the years 700 and 1000 in Muslim-ruled Spain. This is offered as proof of Islam’s inherent tolerance toward non-Muslims. Was it a golden age of tolerance? In answering this question, it is important to know that this idea was introduced largely by Protestant and Jewish historians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Examples included Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), the most prominent English historian of his era, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891), the most prominent Jewish historian of the nineteenth century. They had the same agenda: to depict the Catholic Church in the most negative light possible (owing to its treatment of Protestants and Jews). It was therefore important to depict Islam, in comparison, as particularly beneficent to non-Muslims.
The truth is that compared with Christian Europe in the early Middle Ages, Islam in Spain did experience a golden age intellectually, scientifically, and in terms of tolerance toward Jews and Christians. However, though the Jews of Muslim Spain were not persecuted as much as the Jews and other non-Christians were in medieval Christian Europe, Jews and Christians were persecuted during this golden age. There was a Muslim legal code that prescribed the treatment of Jews and Christians (dhimmis)—the Pact of [the caliph] Umar, assumed to date from the late seventh or early eighth century. Among the rules that Jews and Christians had to obey:
“We shall show respect toward the Muslims, and we shall rise from our seats when they wish to sit.
“We shall not manifest our religion publicly nor convert anyone to it. We shall not prevent any of our kin from entering Islam if they wish it.
“We shall not mount on saddles…”23
The guiding principle for how to treat Jews and Christians was attributed to the Koran, Sura 9:29: “Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture [that is, Jews and Christians]…who follow not the religion of truth [that is, Islam], until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low.”
“Being brought low” meant humiliating dhimmis, especially when they brought their tribute, their special dhimmi taxes, to Muslims. The rules for humiliating Jews and Christians were laid out explicitly:
“The dhimmi, Christian or Jew, goes on a fixed day in person to the emir, appointed to receive the poll tax, who occupies a high throne-like seat. The dhimmi stands before him, offering the poll tax on his open palm. The emir takes it so that his hand is on top and the dhimmi’s underneath. Then the emir gives him a blow on the neck, and a guard, standing upright before the emir, drives him roughly away. The same procedure is followed with the second, third and the following taxpayers. The public is admitted to enjoy this show.”24
Another law designed to humiliate dhimmis required them to wear distinguishing clothing so as to enable Muslims to immediately recognize a Jew or a Christian and in order to make Jews and Christians appear foolish. In 807, the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid decreed that Jews must wear a yellow belt and a tall canonical hat. According to Holocaust historian Professor Raul Hilberg and in the view of Professor Bernard Lewis, this decree spread to the West and much later provided the model for the Nazi decree that Jews wear a yellow star.25
By the late eleventh century, the humiliation of Jews and Christians increased. According to a Jewish writer in Baghdad: “Each Jew had to have a stamp of lead…hang from his neck, on which the word dhimmi was inscribed. On women he [the Muslim vizier Abu Shuja] likewise imposed two distinguishing marks: the shoes worn by each woman had to be one red and one black. She also had to carry on her neck…a small brass bell…. And the Gentiles [Muslims] used to ridicule Jews, the mob and children often assaulting Jews in all the streets of Baghdad.”26
Regarding Christians in the region that is modern day Iraq, in the words of BBC religious affairs reporter Edward Stourton, “Christians were persecuted and sometimes massacred during the turbulent period that lasted from the late 13th century until the early 16th century, and were forced to live as second-class citizens under the Ottomans.”27
At the same time in Egypt, the Fatimid caliph Hakim ordered Christians to wear a cross with arms two feet long, while Jews had to wear around their necks balls weighing five pounds.28
Whatever one’s assessment of the golden age, that era began to end in the eleventh century, when degradation of the Jews led to violence against them. In 1066, Muslim mobs massacred most of the Jews of Granada, and the Jewish vizier, Joseph ibn Naghrela, was crucified (crucifixion is one of the modes of execution prescribed in the Koran). The worst violence took place under the Almohades, a Berber Muslim dynasty that ruled Morocco and Spain in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
“At the beginning of the twelfth century, a Muslim jurist in Cordova [Spain] claimed to have found…a tradition, soon widely accepted in Morocco and Spain, that Muhammad’s original decree of toleration of Jews had been limited to a period of five hundred years from the hegira [Muhammad’s flight from Mecca]. If by that time the expected Jewish Messiah were not to arrive, the Jews were supposed to give up their religion and join the ranks of Islam. The time limit expired, of course, in 1107.”29
On the basis of this new doctrine, in 1146, Abd al-Mu’min, the builder of the Almohad Empire in North Africa and Spain, gave the Jews the choice of Islam or death. When nearly all of them refused to convert, nearly every Jew in Fez, the capital of Morocco, was killed. As for those who converted, the Almohades put them under constant surveillance, and those whose conversions seemed insincere were executed, had their property confiscated, and their wives given to Muslims. In the words of S. D. Goitein, “All the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition were anticipated under Almohade rule.”30
While the Almohades were distinguished by their violence, the humiliation of dhimmis was characteristic of Muslim rule generally. A good example is Yemen because it was the one Muslim country with a non-Muslim minority (Jews) that was never ruled by a European power. It was therefore able to treat its Jews in a Muslim manner uninfluenced by non-Muslim domination. In 1679, Jews in most of Yemen were expelled from the cities and villages in which they lived. When allowed back, they were confined to special Jewish settlements outside of the cities, and the synagogue of San‘a, the capital, was converted into a mosque, which still exists under the name Masjid al-Jala (the Mosque of the Expulsion).
The greatest recurrent suffering that Yemenite Jews experienced was the forced conversion to Islam of Jewish children whose fathers had died. This was practiced until the Jews of Yemen fled in 1948 to the newly established State of Israel. The justification for this practice was that Muhammad was believed to have said, “Everyone is born in a state of natural religion [Islam]. It is only his parents who make a Jew or Christian out of him.” Accordingly, a fatherless Jew should grow up in “the natural religion” of Islam.
As a result, when a Jewish father died there was often a race between Jewish communal leaders who sought to place the man’s children with Jewish parents and the Muslim authorities who sought to kidnap the children and place them in Muslim homes where they would be converted to Islam. Given the low status of women, the fact that the Jewish child still had a mother was of no significance to the Yemenis.
The Jews often lost this race. Goitein wrote that “many families arrived in Israel with one or more of their children lost to them, and I have heard of some widows who have been bereaved in this way of all their offspring.” Yet, as persecuted as the Yemenite Jews were, they were also denied the right to leave the country.31
The purpose of these descriptions is not to offer a compendium of Muslim mistreatment of non-Muslims. It is to invalidate two arguments: that Islam’s history reveals it to be a religion that has been tolerant of non-Muslims and that the anti-Semitism that has increasingly pervaded much of the Muslim world is solely a response to the existence of Israel (as if that were a moral defense).
Egypt provides another example.
In his authoritative book, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, Edward Lane, a British Arabic scholar who lived most of his life in Egypt, wrote that, at the time of his study (1833–35), the Jews were living “under a less oppressive government in Egypt than in any other country of the Turkish Empire.” Nevertheless, the Jews “are held in the utmost contempt and abhorrence by the Muslims in general.”
Lane explained: “Not long ago, they used often to be jostled in the streets of Cairo, and sometimes beaten merely for passing on the right hand of a Muslim. At present, they are less oppressed; but still they scarcely ever dare to utter a word of abuse when reviled or beaten unjustly by the meanest Arab or Turk; for many a Jew has been put to death upon a false and malicious accusation of uttering disrespectful words against the Kur-an [sic] or the Prophet. It is common to hear an Arab abuse his jaded ass, and after applying to him various opprobrious epithets, end by calling the beast a Jew.”32
That this was the Jews’ situation in Egypt, “a less oppressive government” than elsewhere in the Muslim Arab world, obviously tells us a great deal about Muslim anti-Semitism in the nineteenth century—prior to Israel’s existence and even prior to Zionism.
In Syria, in 1840, some French Catholics introduced into the Arab world the medieval Christian blood libel that Jews slaughter non-Jewish children in order to use their blood to bake Passover matzoh. After a Capuchin monk in Damascus vanished, the local French consul told police authorities that the Jews probably had murdered him to procure his blood for a religious ritual. Several Damascus Jews were then arrested, and under torture one “confessed” that leaders of the Jewish community had planned the monk’s murder. Many other Jews were then arrested, and under torture more such confessions were extracted. French officials pressured Syria’s ruler, Muhammad Ali, to try the arrested men, and only after an international protest organized by Jewish communities around the world were the Jews who survived their tortures released.33
The blood libel immediately became popular among Muslims, who attacked Jews as drinkers of Muslim blood in Aleppo, Syria, in 1853; Damascus again, in 1848 and 1890; Cairo in 1844 and 1901–1902; and Alexandria in 1870 and 1881.34
In nineteenth-century Palestine, which was under Ottoman Muslim rule, Jews had to walk past Muslims on their left, as the left is identified with Satan, and they always had to yield the right of way to a Muslim by “stepping into the street and letting him pass.” Failure to abide by these degrading customs often provoked a violent response.
In Palestine, where Jews had lived for thousands of years, synagogues could only be located in hidden, remote areas, and Jews could pray only in muted voices. In addition, despite widespread poverty, Palestinian Jews had to pay a host of protection taxes. For example, Jews paid one hundred pounds a year to the Muslim villagers of Siloam (just outside Jerusalem) not to disturb the graves in the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, and fifty pounds a year to the Ta’amra Arabs not to deface the Tomb of Rachel on the road to Bethlehem. They also had to pay ten pounds annually to Sheik Abu Gosh not to molest Jewish travelers on the road to Jerusalem, even though the Turkish authorities were already paying him to maintain order on that road.35
With regard to other Middle Eastern countries, the noted French-Jewish writer Albert Memmi, who grew up in North Africa, wrote:
In Morocco in 1907, a massacre of Jews took place in Casablanca, along with the usual embellishments—rape, women carried away into the mountains, hundreds of homes and shops burned, etc…. In 1912 a big massacre in Fez…. In Algeria in 1934, massacre in Constantine, twenty-four people killed, dozens and dozens of others seriously wounded…. In Aden in 1946…over one hundred people dead and seventy-six wounded, and two thirds of the stores sacked and burned…. In June, 1941, in Iraq, six hundred people killed, one thousand seriously wounded, looting, rapes, arson, one thousand houses destroyed, six hundred stores looted…. [In Libya]: November 4th and 5th, 1945, massacre in Tripoli; November 6th and 7th in Zanzour, Zaouia, Foussaber, Ziltain, etc., girls and women raped in front of their families, the stomachs of pregnant women slashed open, the infants ripped out of them, children smashed with crowbars…. All this can be found in the newspapers of the time, including the local Arab papers.36
Memmi summarized the Jews’ status under Islam in the twentieth century: “Roughly speaking and in the best of cases, the Jew is protected like a dog which is part of man’s property, but if he raises his head or acts like a man, then he must be beaten so that he will always remember his status.”37
Once the Jewish State of Israel was established, the anti-Semitism expressed throughout the Arab world, and among Islamists outside the Arab world, was and remains essentially the same as that of the Nazi regime. On an almost daily basis, magazine and newspaper articles have been written, films shown, books published, and television interviews conducted in which Jews—not only Israeli Jews, as if that would be morally defensible—have been depicted as subhumans worthy of death, as animals, and as sacrificers of children.
Of the tens of thousands of anti-Semitic statements regularly made in the Muslim world, we begin with three Saudi examples:
Though mutually contradictory, both Holocaust denial and Holocaust celebration are normative features of Arab Muslim, and non-Arab Islamist, societies. Indeed, the Mufti (leading Muslim religious figure) of Jerusalem spent much of World War II in Berlin encouraging the Nazis in their extermination of the Jews, justifying it with citations from the Koran and other Islamic works. And in the European Union at the present time, half of the anti-Semitic incidents are committed by Muslims, even though Muslims make up only 3 to 4 percent of its population.41
The anti-Jewish rhetoric in some Muslim countries is genocidal in intent. The Iranian regime repeatedly calls for the annihilation of Israel, and the Palestinian media is saturated with Jew-hatred. Here are excerpts from a 2010 sermon given in a Palestinian mosque and broadcast on Palestinian television:
The Jews, the enemies of Allah and of His Messenger, the enemies of Allah and of His Messenger! Enemies of humanity in general, and of Palestinians in particular—they wage war against us using all kinds of crimes, and as you see—even the mosques are not spared their racism…. Ourenmity with the Jews is a matter of faith; our enmity with the Jews is a matter of faith, more than an enmity owing to occupation and the land….
Oh Muslims! The Jews are the Jews. The Jews are the Jews. Even if donkeys would cease to bray, dogs cease to bark, wolves cease to howl and snakes to bite, the Jews would not cease to harbor hatred towards Muslims. The Prophet said that if two Jews would be alone with a Muslim, they would think only of killing him. The Prophet says: “You shall fight the Jews and kill them, until the tree and the stone will speak and say: ‘Oh Muslim, Oh servant of Allah’—the tree and the stone will say…‘Oh Muslim, Oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him….’” Thus, this land will be liberated only by means of Jihad.42
Christians Today
As we have seen, Christians living in the Muslim world were similarly treated. They have been spared only the genocidal rhetoric directed against Jews. But wherever Christians lived in countries conquered by Muslims, those communities were persecuted to the point of near or total disappearance. Once the center of the Christian world, the Middle East has been rendered virtually devoid of Christians. By the eleventh century Muslim invasions had largely annihilated Byzantine civilization.
The only remaining Middle Eastern Christian communities of any size are in Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq.
In Lebanon, the Christian percentage of the population decreased from 54 percent in 1932 to 40 percent as of 2008.
In Egypt, the Christian Copts, who constituted the majority of Egyptians until the tenth century, now constitute 10 percent of the population. At the time of this writing, they are increasingly persecuted; they are beaten, murdered, and their churches are burned.
In Iraq, the Christian population, which also long predates the Muslim population, has so dwindled that Iraq may have almost no Christians in the near future. As reported in the Telegraph of London, “The campaign of violence against Christians is one of the most under-reported stories of Iraq since the [American] invasion of 2003…. By the time the dust finally settles on the chaotic current chapter of Iraq’s history, the Christian community may have disappeared altogether—after 2,000 years as a significant presence. About 200,000 Iraqi Christians have already fled the country; they once made up three per cent of its population, and they now account for half of its refugees.”43
Indonesia is the nation with the largest number of Muslims; they compose about 86 percent of Indonesia’s population. Generally speaking, relations between Muslims and non-Muslims have been cordial. But it is worth noting that Indonesia was not invaded and Islamicized by Muslim armies, but became Muslim gradually, over centuries, beginning around the sixteenth—relatively late compared to other Muslim countries; and Indonesia was under Western European (Dutch) colonial rule for much of that time. Indonesia was never a Muslim state so much as an archipelago of islands with a Muslim majority (except for the island of Bali, which remains largely Hindu). At the present time, however, there are sporadic violent attacks against Christians and Christian churches. Such attacks have taken place a few times each year for over a decade. I offer only two examples:
In 2005 the BBC reported, “Three girls have been beheaded and another badly injured as they walked to a Christian school in [Sulawesi] Indonesia.”44 According to the Australian, the girls “were beheaded as a Ramadan ‘trophy’ by Indonesian militants who conceived the idea after a visit to Philippines jihadists.”45
In 2011, “Hundreds of Muslims in central Java set fire to two churches and attacked a court, claiming that a five-year prison sentence given to a Christian who had allegedly blasphemed Islam was too lenient.”46
In Pakistan, as of 2008, there were 2.8 million Christians, about 1.6 percent of the Pakistani population. Pakistan was founded to be a Muslim country, and its constitution prohibits Christians or any other non-Muslim from being president or prime minister and from holding a number of other leading positions in the country. Furthermore, the Federal Shariat Court has the power to strike down any law that it deems contrary to Sharia.
In the court’s own words,47 “The court is backed by powerful provisions of the Constitution. The preamble to the Constitution explicitly affirms that sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to Almighty Allah alone, and the authority to be exercised by the people of Pakistan within the limits prescribed by Him is a sacred trust…. Article 227 makes it incumbent that all existing laws shall be brought in conformity with the injunctions of Islam as laid down in the Holy Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him), and Chapter 3-A…entrusts the court with the responsibility to examine and decide the question whether or not any law or provision of law is repugnant to the injunctions of Islam as laid down in the Holy Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him).”
Pakistan has essentially become a Muslim theocracy, and Christians are therefore increasingly treated as second-class citizens. There are regular reports of Christians beaten and killed and churches burned. With the expansion of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws beginning in the 1980s, Christians have been subject to additional avenues of persecution. According to the BBC, “Hundreds of Christians are among the accused—at least 12 of them were given the death sentence for blaspheming against the Prophet…. A large majority of Pakistani people support the idea that blasphemers should be punished.”48
Christians in Nigeria
In November 2002, Muslims in Nigeria rioted, beating and killing Christians and torching churches. Why they did this is as important as what they did.
As mentioned earlier, Nigeria had been scheduled to host the Miss World pageant later that year, and many Nigerians were excited about having the pageant with its attendant world publicity. The Nigerian government hoped it would bolster trade, tourism, and international goodwill. However, many of Nigeria’s Muslims, who make up about half of Nigeria’s population, opposed the presence of the pageant. They condemned the pageant’s “nudity” and its “encouraging of promiscuity.”
On Saturday, November 16, 2002, the popular Nigerian newspaper ThisDay, almost half of whose staff was Muslim, published a piece responding to the Muslim opposition to the beauty pageant by one of its reporters, Isioma Daniel, a Christian in her midtwenties. In her article, she wrote, “The Muslims thought it was immoral to bring 92 women to Nigeria and ask them to revel in vanity. What would Muhammad think? In all honesty, he would probably have chosen a wife from one of them. The irony is that Algeria, an Islamic country, is one of the countries participating in the contest.”
To most of us, this paragraph is utterly innocuous, insulting of no one and no faith. If anything, the article’s citation of Muhammad was complimentary to both him and the contestants. To many Muslims, however, it was worse than insulting; it was “blasphemy.”
Though the management and editor of ThisDay immediately profusely apologized in print, and did so day after day, Islamic fundamentalists, chanting “God is Great” burned cars, churches, houses, and the offices of ThisDay.
The Nigerian press reported, “Muslim youths chanting ‘Allah Akhbar, Allah Akhbar’ God is great, God is great, brandishing swords, cutlasses, knives, cudgels and other dangerous implements defaced some churches, hotels and other known Christian places of businesses which they razed.”49
Christians counterattacked, and more than two hundred Nigerians died, some burned alive in gasoline-soaked tires.
Some Muslim leaders called for calm after accepting the newspaper’s abject apologies. But many of those leaders made it clear that they considered the original article a grave insult to Islam, and compared the woman who wrote it to Salman Rushdie, the Muslim-born writer whose death sentence for writing a “blasphemous” novel they reaffirmed.
This story is a microcosm of much of what has been happening in significant parts of the Muslim world:
Postscript: The young woman who wrote the sentence was immediately fired, fled Nigeria permanently, and finally settled in Norway, where she was granted asylum, and where she now lives.
In Nigeria since then, Christians have been killed and churches burned by Muslims on a regular basis, including an attack on a Catholic church on Christmas Day 2011, in which at least thirty-five people were killed and fifty-two wounded. Pope Benedict condemned the attack the following day. But beyond that, fears of antagonizing Muslims prevailed, and as far as the world was concerned, there was more “sectarian violence” in Nigeria.
Sudan
In Sudan, the Islamic government of that country engaged in mass murder—generally declared a genocide—through killing and starvation in the southern and western part of that country, particularly in the province of Darfur. Non-Muslim and non-Arab Sudanese Muslims were targeted by the Islamic regime. Human Rights Watch released a report that the government of Sudan gave Arab gangs “a license to rape” non-Arab women and girls in Darfur.50 And according to the United Nations Human Rights Council, “The genocide in Darfur has claimed 400,000 lives and displaced over 2,500,000 people.”
BLASPHEMY—“INSULTING ISLAM”
In much of the Muslim world, “insulting Islam,” most especially any reference to Muhammad deemed disrespectful by any Muslims, defines blasphemy, and the penalty is death. While other religions have the concept of blasphemy, there are two distinguishing aspects to blasphemy in Islam.
It takes only an “insult” to be considered blasphemy. And the definition of “insult” is entirely subjective. Anything anyone—usually a non-Muslim—says that any group of Muslims, a Muslim leader, or even one Muslim with access to the media finds insulting to Islam, the Koran, or Muhammad can be deemed blasphemy and worthy of death.
People are put to death for this religious offense to this day. Though in the Torah blaspheming God—understood as cursing God by name (“Jehovah”)—is a capital offense, there is no record of a Jewish court executing a Jew or non-Jew for blasphemy in three thousand years. Within Christendom, the last execution of a blasphemer was in Britain in 1697.
But in numerous Muslim countries, non-Muslims are killed for this offense, as are Muslims who oppose blasphemy laws. As noted previously, Pakistan extended its blasphemy laws in 1982 and made blasphemy a capital offense in 1986. Attempts by liberal Pakistanis to repeal the country’s blasphemy laws have been met with violent demonstrations and the killing of Pakistanis who support repeal.
One such courageous Muslim was Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab province in Pakistan. A critic of the blasphemy laws, Taseer publicly supported a Christian woman who was sentenced to death by a Pakistani court for allegedly making derogatory remarks against Muhammad. In January 2011, Taseer was shot dead by a member of his security detail. The assassin, Mumtaz Qadri, said he killed Taseer because of the governor’s opposition to the blasphemy laws. Qadri became a hero in Pakistan, and was so widely supported by Pakistan’s young lawyers that thousands of them volunteered to defend him. In addition, tens of thousands of Islamists demonstrated in Karachi in support of the blasphemy laws, while clerics threatened to kill anyone who challenged them. In the words of the Wall Street Journal, “The killing highlighted the extent to which extremist Islam has permeated Pakistan’s middle class.”51
Nearly every Muslim-majority country has blasphemy laws. Countries that use Sharia law as part of their legal system all have blasphemy laws. These include Malaysia and Indonesia, often cited as examples of tolerant and modern Muslim countries. In Iran, people have been imprisoned, tortured, and executed for violating the country’s blasphemy laws. Twelve of Nigeria’s thirty-six states have Sunni majorities and they all have Sharia courts that can execute a person for blasphemy.
Salmaan Taseer is an example of a proud and heroic Muslim. But he was not a practicing Muslim, and it is among practicing Muslims that both the problem and solution to Islamism lie.52
THE MUSLIM OBSESSION WITH ISRAEL
Much of the Islamic world and nearly the entire Arab world have been obsessed with destroying the Jewish State of Israel since its founding in 1948. The hatred of Israel is such that the anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, and anti-Zionist speeches, writings, television programs, and films that permeate the Arab and Islamist worlds rival the worst anti-Semitic propaganda in history.
It is critical to understand that it was not the creation of 760,000 Arab-Palestinian refugees that has created this hatred. It was this hatred that created the refugees. Had six Arab armies not attacked Israel to destroy it in 1948, there would not have been any refugees.
The Palestinian refugee problem could have easily been solved in 1948, just as virtually every other refugee problem in the world has been; and just as the refugee problem of the 800,000 Jews who fled Arab countries during and after 1948 was solved. But, since 1948, Arab countries have deliberately mistreated the Palestinian refugees by refusing to integrate them into their countries and by keeping them in refugee camps—the only refugees in the world to be kept in camps for three generations. The Arab countries did this so as to keep the world’s attention focused on the plight of the Palestinian refugees and to use them as a way to defame and ultimately, they hope, delegitimize and de-Judaize Israel.
The dislocation of Palestinian refugees was among the least wrenching refugee crises in the world. Unlike virtually any of the other millions of refugees of the twentieth century, nearly all Palestinian refugees were dislocated within only a thirty-mile area, within the same culture and geography, among people in the same ethnic group, who spoke the same language and practiced the same religion.
Moreover, if the creation of refugees caused Palestinian terror or was the reason for the Palestinian/Muslim goal of destroying Israel, why didn’t any of the world’s other refugee problems create terror or the goal of destroying the refugee-producing state?
The Muslim country of Pakistan, for example, when it was created, just nine months before Israel was, produced approximately 14.5 million refugees: 7,276,000 Muslims fled to Pakistan from India and 7,249,000 Hindus and Sikhs fled to India from Pakistan. If creating refugees renders Israel illegitimate, Pakistan should be many times less legitimate than Israel. And unlike Israel, which existed twice before, there never had been a Pakistan—it was ripped out of India to make another Muslim state.
Then, in 1971, after years of neglect by the western half of Pakistan, the eastern half of Pakistan—what became Bangladesh—seceded, and a bloody war unleashed by West Pakistan created about seven million additional Muslim refugees who fled to India (they knew they would be treated better by Hindus than by their fellow Muslims in western Pakistan). Yet those seven million Muslim refugees have been entirely ignored by the world—because the Muslim world has ignored them. Unlike the 760,000 Palestinian refugees of 1948, they serve no larger Islamic purpose. But if 760,000 Palestinian refugees render Israel illegitimate, why don’t seven million Muslim refugees—or the seven million Hindu and Sikh refugees of 1947—render Pakistan illegitimate?
The bottom line is that Muslim nations, the Arab ones and Iran in particular, do not hate Israel because of concern over 760,000 Muslim refugees. The Muslim world has produced twenty times that number of refugees, many of them Muslim. And if Israel had not produced a single Arab refugee, the Arab world would still have sought its destruction. The Muslims who hate Israel do so because they cannot abide the fact that Jews have an independent state in their midst.
Judea Pearl, the father of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, devoted his life in 2002, when Islamists in Pakistan murdered his son, to building bridges between Jews and Muslims. A secular liberal professor of computer science and statistics at UCLA, Judea Pearl had great hopes for this idealistic mission. He told me on my radio show in 2010, however, that he had come to the sad realization that “99.99 percent” of the Muslim world does not believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state.
The day the Arab and wider Muslim worlds accept the existence of a Jewish state—not merely sign a state of nonbelligerence treaty with Israel, as Egypt did—will mark the beginning of a moral and religious transformation within Islam that all people of goodwill yearn for.
4. Islam and Women
HONOR BEATINGS AND KILLINGS
In many parts of the Muslim world family members—usually females—are beaten or killed in order to preserve the family’s “honor.”
To cite one example, because of the prominence of the Muslim woman involved: In May 2010, at her father’s home in Manchester, England, Afshan Azad, twenty-one, a Muslim actress who played the witch Padma Patil in four of the Harry Potter movies, was beaten, thrown across a room, and threatened with death by her father and brother. The reason? She was dating a Hindu actor.
“Locked in her room, Afshan escaped by climbing out through her bedroom window, reported the assault to the police and initially undertook to give evidence against her father and brother. But by the time the case came to trial, she refused to come to court so that the charges of attempted murder had to be dropped.”53
To cite one more example:
“On May 31, 1994, Kifaya Husayn, a 16-year-old Jordanian girl, was lashed to a chair by her 32-year-old brother. He gave her a drink of water and told her to recite an Islamic prayer. Then he slashed her throat. Immediately afterward, he ran out into the street, waving the bloody knife and crying, ‘I have killed my sister to cleanse my honor.’ Kifaya’s crime? She was raped by another brother, a 21-year-old man.”54
Defenders of Islam’s reputation argue that nothing in Islam calls for such atrocities and that the practices are cultural, not religious.
Even though the Koran calls for hitting a disobedient wife (Sura 4:34), I do not wish to argue against either claim. Christians and Jews have troubling verses in the Bible and they long ago found ways to remain religious believers without literally enacting those verses. And as regards cultural practices, there are indeed many cases in which culture is more influential than religious texts among other religious groups, not just Muslims.
What is troubling here are three additional facts.
First, even if cultural, the practice of honor killing is primarily found among Muslims. Moreover, it is not isolated to one or two Muslim countries, but exists in many of them, and persists among Muslims who migrate to Western Europe and America.
Second, few Muslim religious authorities have denounced honor killings, and whatever denunciations have been made pale in comparison to the intensity and frequency of Muslim denunciations of apostasy, blasphemy, and perceived insults to Muhammad among non-Muslims.
Third, and perhaps most problematic, Western Muslim groups deny that honor killings are a Muslim problem, since domestic violence occurs in all cultures. Thus honor killings are lumped together with all killing of female relatives for any reason. After Aqsa Parvez, a sixteen-year-old Muslim girl, was murdered by her father and brother in Ontario, Canada, for not wearing a hijab outside of their home, the editor of the American Muslim wrote, “This is not a Muslim problem because it crosses all religious lines.”55
Far more common than honor killings are other manifestations of a lower status for women in many Islamic societies than elsewhere in the world. The ban on women traveling without a male relative as an escort, the requirement to wear a veil, or worse, an entire face-covering, and the Taliban ban on girls in Afghanistan attending school are a few examples of the suppression of women that are unique to Muslim society.
If Islam wishes to present itself as the best answer to humanity’s problems, it will have to confront the real problem of the status of women in Muslim societies. So far, there is almost only denial that the problem exists.
5. The Rejection of Reason
UNLIKE THE WOMEN PROBLEM, what is almost unknown outside the Muslim world—and is perhaps not widely acknowledged within the Muslim world—is the rejection of reason that came to dominate Islamic theology beginning in the early Middle Ages. Christianity and Judaism have a long history of valuing reason. While both believe that certain faith claims can and must transcend reason—after all, if faith were only rational, faith would be a meaningless term—neither religion rejected, and both strongly affirmed, reason.
The most powerful example comes at the beginning of the Hebrew Bible, Judaism’s only Bible, and one part of Christianity’s Bible. Abraham, the first Hebrew, argues with God. When God informs Abraham of His intention to destroy the evil cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham immediately argues with God on behalf of the good people who might live in those cities: Why should they die along with the evil ones? Abraham’s challenge (Genesis 18), “Will not the judge of all the earth act justly?” presupposes that God acts rationally, that is, in ways man can use reason to try to understand.
Such a scene—man arguing with God—is inconceivable in the Koran and in normative Islam. While Israel means “struggle with God,” the term Islam means “submission” (to Allah). Allah’s will is inscrutable, not subject to human beings’ rational understanding.
The very fact that Abraham can question God’s actions means that the Jewish understanding of God from the very beginning meant that there are humanly understandable moral and rational laws in the universe to which God Himself, the author of these laws, may be held accountable. As Islam developed, this notion became heresy, and Muslims who argued for it were eventually put to death. Allah is not understandable; Allah does what He wants; and the world works according to His will, which is neither subject to reason nor to laws, whether of morality or of nature, that man could in any way understand.
Allah alone runs the world; reason and nature have no say. When Muslims say “insha’allah,” “if Allah wills it,” which many do many times a day, it is not only meant as Jews or Christians mean it when they say “God willing.” In Islam, “Allah’s will” alone directs everything. To use a famous example, according to orthodox Muslim doctrine, whether or not an arrow hits a bull’s-eye is not a result of the accuracy of the archer or of the prevailing wind pattern, because to claim that the shooter and the winds determined where the arrow would land limits Allah’s power, and that constitutes heresy.
That is probably the primary reason why, after a certain date, science ceased to—most likely could not—develop in the Muslim world. Science studies the laws of nature. But if laws of nature dictate what happens in the universe, then, the thinking went, Allah’s will is not the only thing that dictates what happens in the universe. And that cannot be. Therefore, traditional Islam came to deny reason and causality.
This also explains why the outlook of so many believing Muslims has been that there is nothing to be learned outside the Koran and of Islam as it developed. Everything non-Muslim is erroneous. The greatest Muslim writer, Ibn Khaldun, wrote, “When the Muslims conquered Persia, general Sa’d bin Abi Waqqas petitioned Caliph Omar for permission to distribute the huge quantity of captured books and scientific papers as booty. Caliph Omar wrote back: ‘Throw them in the water. If what they contain is right guidance, God has given us better guidance. If it is error, God has protected us against it.’”56
In the words of Robert R. Reilly, former director of Voice of America and an expert on Middle Eastern history and culture, this denial of reason and causality and the ensuing neglect of the study of other cultures and religions “is the key to unlocking such puzzles as why the Arab world stands near the bottom of every measure of human development; [and] why scientific inquiry is nearly moribund in the Islamic world…”57
This was not always the case in Muslim theology. It became so between the ninth and thirteenth centuries because of the ascendance of what is known as the Ash’arite school of Muslim theology. Aside from the deleterious consequences to reason, science, intellectual curiosity, and culture, the ascendancy of the Ash’arite school created another terrible consequence. Just as reason is not applicable in the natural world, reason is not applicable in the moral realm. To a non-Muslim, people shouting “Allahu akbar!” “Allah is the greatest!” while slitting the throats of innocent men, women, and children or while blowing up people in trains, planes, schools, and pizza shops seems oxymoronic, since God is associated with normative moral standards. But to those who believe that human reason has no place in assessing right and wrong, murdering innocents while shouting “Allahu Akbar” is in no way absurd.
6. Theocracy
THE GOAL OF ISLAM is that the state and ultimately the world will be governed by Islam. This means Sharia law enforced by an Islamic government ruled by Islamic leaders. Islam without its theocratic goal would constitute a new form of Islam, one that, if enough Muslims wish to create, I believe can one day be created. But it has never existed and with few individual exceptions, does not now. The theocratic goal, probably more than any other factor, is why Islamist values are incompatible with liberty.
There is a Jewish parallel that may help illuminate the issue. Like Islam, the traditional Jewish ideal was also theocratic: a state run by and that enforced, Halakha, Jewish Law. This, too, would be incompatible with liberty.
There are, however, two critical differences between the traditional Jewish theocratic ideal and that of Islam.
First, mainstream Judaism, including mainstream Orthodox Judaism, long ago abandoned this goal (at least until a future Messianic Age). There is no normative Jewish movement that seeks to have the Israeli government impose Halakha (with a few exceptions such as kosher food in the Israeli army) on all Israeli Jews, let alone on Israeli non-Jews.*
Second, and even more important, even if the Jewish ideal of a religious Jewish state that imposed Halakha on its Jewish citizens remained in force, it would only apply to one country (Israel). Judaism has never called for imposing Judaism on anyone outside Israel. Judaism doesn’t even seek to make non-Jews Jewish, let alone impose Jewish law on them. It seeks only to make non-Jews ethical monotheists (that is, people who believe in the one God who demands ethical conduct—precisely what Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Lincoln believed, as we shall see).
The Islamist desire to have every human being governed by Sharia, which would be imposed by a religious Muslim state, has no analogue in the world. Traditional Christians yearn to see every human being come to belief in Christ. But just as with the Jewish theocratic ideal (which, to repeat, applied to Jews, and only in Israel), there is no similarity here. The only acceptable method of bringing people to faith in Christ is persuasion. There is nothing in Christianity today, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox, that believes in any form of coercion to impose Christianity. And there is no Christian religious law analogous to Sharia or Halakha. Therefore, there would be little that is uniquely Christian to impose. The argument that many Christians wish to impose a ban on abortion is also not analogous. There are many non-Christians, including atheists, Jews, and Buddhists, who believe that most abortions are immoral. But there is no non-Muslim community that believes that religious police should monitor women’s clothing and other behaviors, or that a person who converts from one religion to another should be put to death.
Therefore, the Muslim desire to see the world governed by Sharia must be worrisome to non-Muslims—and to liberty-loving Muslims.
In December 2010, the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project reported the results of its polling of Muslims in seven predominantly Muslim countries. Here are the responses to the question, “Is It Good or Bad that Islam Plays a Large Role in Politics?”58
Egypt:
Good 95%; Bad 2%
Indonesia:
Good 95%; Bad 4%
Pakistan:
Good 88%; Bad 6%
Nigeria:
Good 88%; Bad 7%
Lebanon:
Good 72%; Bad 19%
Jordan:
Good 53%; Bad 37%
Turkey:
Good 45%; Bad 38%
As summarized by the Pew Center: “Muslims in Nigeria and in nearly all of the predominantly Muslim countries surveyed overwhelmingly welcome Islamic influence over their countries’ politics.”59
What does this mean? In real life, it means that the great majority of Muslims in the seven Muslim-majority countries polled—only three of which are Arab countries—want their countries to be governed by Sharia. How do we know this?
In Egypt, 82 percent of Muslims want adulterers stoned; in Jordan 70 percent; in Indonesia 42 percent; in Pakistan 82 percent; and in Nigeria 56 percent. Similar percentages of the Muslim populations of those countries want anyone who converts out of Islam to be put to death.
In response to such data, Muslim and Western apologists for the contemporary Islamic world point out that in all these countries (except Pakistan), a majority of the Muslims polled consider “democracy preferable to any other form of government.” Therefore, the argument goes, the Muslim world differs little in its values from the Western world.
Unfortunately, this argument is misleading. While, of course, there are Muslims, especially the more secular ones, living in these Muslim countries, who yearn for Western-style democracy, the majority of respondents want democracy under Islam. They want to vote—for the religious Muslims who will govern them. It is not a preference for Western-style democracy in which non-Islamic or secular parties can govern. They want, in a nutshell, democracy more than liberty.
7. Islamic Law and Economics
SHARIA HAS ALSO BLOCKED Muslim economic development. A Turkish scholar, Timur Kuran, formerly King Faisal Professor of Islamic Law and Culture at the University of Southern California and presently professor of Islamic studies at Duke University, has written regarding the Arab world:
The region as a whole has not yet come to terms with the reasons why it turned into an economic laggard. The idea that outsiders are somehow responsible for the Middle East’s underdevelopment resonates with much of the population, including secularists who consider Islamic law backward and obsolete. In particular, the role of Islamic law in blocking organizational modernization and stultifying Middle Eastern, and particularly Muslim, enterprise is hardly understood….
It also sustains sterile debates about the virtues of embracing Islam for solutions to poverty, mismanagement, and powerlessness…. Not even the typical Islamist appreciates the limitations of Islamic law as a basis for social, economic, and political order in the twenty-first century.60