1. Islam Is Not Monolithic
IT IS OFTEN ARGUED that only the ignorant assess Islam negatively, because Islam is not monolithic: There is no one Islam and Muslims are disunited among themselves. The Sunni-Shiite divide is an example of the former, while Arab Muslim fear of non-Arab Muslim Iran is an example of the latter.
But critics do not deny differences within Islam and among Muslims. It is just that those differences are irrelevant to the larger question of Islamist values. However significant Shiite-Sunni differences may be and however great the cultural differences between Arab and non-Arab Muslims, those differences do not change Muslim history, the treatment of non-Muslims, the role of Sharia, the Islamic theocratic ideal, or the diminished role of reason.
During the Cold War, opponents of anti-Communists offered the same argument—that anti-Communists exaggerated the threat of Communism because Communism was not monolithic; it, too, had a deep divide running through it—the Sino-Soviet split. Chinese and Soviet Communists hated one another and competed for support throughout the world. Therefore, it was argued, fears of Communism, given its lack of unity, were exaggerated and betrayed an ignorance of Communism.
The point here is not to equate Islam and Communism. The point here is that a movement’s lack of unity or internal differences does not invalidate moral assessments of it.
In addition, the same people who argue against any negative assessments of Islam on the grounds that there is no one Islam offer glowingly positive assessments of Islam. But if Muslim disunity invalidates criticism, the same Muslim disunity should invalidate praise.
2. Every Bible Has Its Morally Troubling Verses
WHEN VERSES IN THE Koran are cited that call for the killing of nonbelievers, admonish a husband to hit a recalcitrant wife, depict Jews as animals, or call for the humiliation of Jews and Christians, defenders of the Koran note that every Bible has morally troubling verses as well as morally elevated ones. And they are right.
What troubles fair-minded people is that the most morally disturbing verses of the Koran are not found in the Bible. For example, there are no calls in the Old or New Testaments to kill nonbelievers, as there are in the Koran.* Therefore, Muslims who use violence against non-Muslims (especially those that are not dhimmi) can use more than a few verses in the Koran to legitimately defend their actions. At the same time, there are some, though considerably fewer, verses that warn Muslims against engaging in violence except in self-defense. And there are Muslims who emphasize those verses. These courageous individuals are the hope of Islam.
In any event, the most humane societies in the world all emanate from Judeo-Christian roots. No Koran-based societies have attained equivalent moral development, not to mention similar levels of liberty or tolerance. Perhaps one day Koran-based societies will compete in terms of human rights, tolerance of outsiders, and intellectual openness. All good people look forward to that day.
3. The Koran Has Many Uplifting Verses
THERE IS NO QUESTION that the Koran has morally uplifting verses. Perhaps the most widely cited example is “There shall be no coercion in matters of faith.”1 However, as previously noted, until the modern period, Muslim governments frequently offered the choice of Islam or death to non-dhimmi non-Muslims, and a subservient existence to dhimmi (Jews and Christians).
There are other morally elevated verses. Here are some concerning ultimate justice: “Whosoever does an evil deed shall be recompensed only with the like of it, but whosoever does a righteous deed, be it male or female, believing shall enter paradise, therein provided without reckoning” (40:40). Or, “Say, ‘The Truth is from your Lord.’ Let him who will, believe; and let him who will reject [it]” (18:29). Or, “Each soul earns but its own due” (6:164). Also: “And Allah created the heavens and the earth with truth, so that each soul might be recompensed according to what it has earned, with no one wronged” (45:22).
At the same time, two countervailing facts must be acknowledged. One is that morally compromised verses significantly outnumber and sometimes contradict the morally elevated ones. The second is that some moral demands and teachings that are central to the Bible are not found in the Koran. For example, the Torah, on three separate occasions, commands Jews to love the stranger, that is, the non-Jew. There is no command in the Koran to love the non-Muslim, and there are repeated commands to kill “nonbelievers.”
The Koran is and always will be what Koran-based Muslims make it, just as the Bible is what Bible-believing Jews and Christians make it. The Bible has been used to justify evil (slavery and medieval anti-Semitism are the best-known examples) and it has been the basis for the best societies the world has known.
4. The Vast Majority of Muslims
Are Peace-Loving People
PROBABLY THE MOST FREQUENTLY OFFERED argument on behalf of the contemporary Islamic world is that the vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving.
This argument is likely true. But it is irrelevant because, at least in modern times, it has been true of even the most violent societies. In what modern society has the majority of its citizens not been peace-loving? Germany in World War II? The Soviet Union? Contemporary Iran? It doesn’t matter whether the majority of citizens in any given society or religion are peace-loving, because those people are not the ones who create wars of aggression or commit terror. A minority of Germans were members of the Nazi Party and an even smaller percentage of Soviet citizens were Communists. Yet those countries were murder machines.
According to a 2006 Gallup Poll of citizens of Muslim countries, the percentage of Muslims who “felt the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were ‘completely justified’ [was] 7% of the total population across the 10 countries included in the study.” The poll, importantly, also concluded that these “political radicals were, on average, slightly more educated and more affluent than the moderates.”2
So, about 100 million Muslims believe the 9/11 massacres of Americans were completely justified and these Islamists represent the more educated and more affluent strata of Muslim societies. As CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, no conservative, wrote after 9/11, “The problem is not that Osama bin Laden believes that this is a religious war against America. It’s that millions of people across the Islamic world seem to agree.”3
5. Muslim Spain Was a “Golden Age”
of Religious Tolerance
JUST ABOUT EVERY DEFENDER of the Islamic record cites Jews and Christians living under Muslim rule in Spain as an example of the inherently tolerant character of Islam. In the words of the religious historian Karen Armstrong, “We should also remember that until 1492, Jews and Christians lived peaceably and productively together in Muslim Spain—a coexistence that was impossible elsewhere in Europe.”
Similarly, Fareed Zakaria wrote right after 9/11 that “[u]ntil the 1950s, for example, Jews and Christians lived peaceably under Muslim rule. In fact, Bernard Lewis has argued that for much of history religious minorities did better under Muslim rulers than they did under Christian ones.”4
Both Armstrong and Lewis give their assessment of how Jews and Christians fared in Muslim Spain in comparison to how Jews fared in Christian Europe at the same time. This is, however, more of a statement of how oppressive Christian rule was at that time than a statement of how benevolent or tolerant Islam was then and there. Jews and Christians in Muslim Spain were oppressed, but rarely violently so, and fared better than Jews did in Christian Europe.
Nevertheless, as we have seen, Jews and Christians fared poorly throughout most of their sojourn in the Muslim world. Moreover, even if there was a golden age of Muslim tolerance—relative to Christianity—in Spain seven or eight hundred years ago, it is difficult to see the relevance of this to assessing Islamic rule elsewhere at that time, anywhere else at other times, or, most important, anywhere today. There has never been a model of non-Muslim equality under Muslim rule. And the situation of Christians under Muslim rule is worse today than at any time since the Turks’ massacres of Armenian Christians during World War I.
6. Turkey Provides a Democratic Islamist Model
AFTER A CENTURY of forced de-Islamicization and secularization of Turkey, which rendered that country arguably the most modern and tolerant Muslim-majority country, the Turkish people voted into power the AK Party (Justice and Development Party) under the leadership of Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, a religious Muslim who has sought to create an Islamic democratic model in Turkey.
As a result, there have been major changes in Turkish foreign policy. Once the most pro-Western and pro-Israel Muslim country, Turkey has become pro-Iranian, less free, intensely hostile to Israel, and much more alienated from the West. Michael Rubin, senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Civil-Military Relations, and a senior editor of the Middle East Quarterly, wrote in 2010:
Gone, and gone permanently, is secular Turkey, a unique Muslim country that straddled East and West and that even maintained a cooperative relationship with Israel. Today Turkey is an Islamic republic whose government saw fit to facilitate the May 31 flotilla raid on Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Turkey is now more aligned to Iran than to the democracies of Europe. Whereas Iran’s Islamic revolution shocked the world with its suddenness in 1979, Turkey’s Islamic revolution has been so slow and deliberate as to pass almost unnoticed. Nevertheless, the Islamic Republic of Turkey is a reality—and a danger.5
In the words of Ayaan Hirsi Ali in that same year:
True, there remain secularists in Istanbul who revere the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Republic of Turkey. But they have no hold over the key government ministries, and their grip over the army is slipping. Today the talk in Istanbul is quite openly about an ‘Ottoman alternative,’ which harks back to the days when the Sultan ruled over an empire that stretched from North Africa to the Caucasus….
A year ago Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan congratulated Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his re-election after he blatantly stole the presidency. Then Turkey joined forces with Brazil to try to dilute the American-led effort to tighten U.N. sanctions aimed at stopping Iran’s nuclear arms program. Most recently, Turkey sponsored the “aid flotilla” designed to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza and to hand Hamas a public relations victory.6
7. Muslim and Arab Countries Are
Victims of Western Imperialism
IT IS FREQUENTLY SAID by Arab, Muslim, and Western defenders of the contemporary Arab and Islamic world’s poor record regarding human rights, scientific and technological achievement, and economic vitality that this record originates in the fact that those countries were stymied in their moral and social development by Western colonialism.
This argument is easily countered.
First, Western control of Arab countries was rarely long.
Second, contrast these countries with India, which was partially ruled by Westerners beginning in the sixteenth century, and was under complete British rule for nearly a hundred years, from about 1856 until 1947.
Third, Pakistan, increasingly Islamist, was never colonized. It was forcibly removed from India to create a secular Muslim-majority country the year India received its independence (1947).
Fourth, neither of the two most repressive Islamist countries, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Saudi Arabia, was ever colonized by a Western power.
If any national group has a right to claim victim status and use it to explain away its evils, it would be the Jews. They were under the rule of others for two thousand years, during most of which they endured mass murder in, and expulsions from, virtually every country in which they lived. Yet from the moment they were allowed independence, they created one of the freest, most liberal democracies in the world.
Western imperialism has virtually nothing to do with the problems that confront the Muslim world.
8. Muslims Did Not Impose Islam on Non-Muslims
PERHAPS THE MOST REMARKABLE DEFENSE of Islamic history is that of Karen Armstrong. She has said, for example, “The idea that Islam imposed itself by the sword is a Western fiction.”7
There are few equivalents in mainstream Western historical writing to this rewriting of history. It is one thing to say that the early medieval world was a barbaric place, and one should not hastily judge violence in that period. But to deny that Muslims violently imposed Islam on Persia or India or significant parts of North Africa is, to use Armstrong’s term, a fiction.
9. Criticism of Islam Is Islamophobic
THE MOST WIDELY OFFERED RESPONSE to criticisms of Islam is that they are Islamophobic.
Islamophobia is one of the most intimidating of all the politically correct epithets developed in the past generation. Whoever developed the term was quite brilliant. The term equates all criticism of Islam with anti-Semitism and racism. According to Western Islamic organizations, Western media, and the United Nations, they have everything in common. Anti-Semites hate all Jews, racists hate all members of a race, and Islamophobes hate all Muslims and Islam. The truth is that Islamophobia has virtually nothing in common with anti-Semitism or racism.
Note that the term is not Muslim-phobia or anti-Muslim; it is Islamo-phobia. There are two sleights of hand here. One is phobia, which of course means fear. But fear of Islam is not the same as hatred of Islam, let alone hatred of all Muslims. Fear and hatred are very different things. One can rightly or wrongly fear Islam, or more usually, aspects of Islam, and have absolutely no bias against Muslims, let alone be a racist.
The other sleight of hand is the equation of Islamophobia with racism, and that is particularly dishonest. Muslims come in every racial group, and Islam has no more to do with race than Christianity or Buddhism do. Nevertheless, mainstream Western media, Islamist groups calling themselves Muslim civil liberties organizations, and various liberal Western organizations repeatedly declare that Islamophobia is racism. To cite a typical example, the Guardian published a column titled “Islamophobia should be as unacceptable as racism.”
Even granting that there are people who fear Islam, how does that in any way correlate with racism? If fear of an ideology renders one a racist, all those who fear conservatism or liberalism should be considered racists.
Some may respond that whereas conservatism and liberalism are ideas, Islam is a religion; one can attack ideas, but not a religion. It is, however, insulting to religions to deny that they are ideas. Religions are theological belief systems, but they are also ideas about how society should be run—and that is more so regarding Islam than perhaps any other religion, as religious Muslims proudly note. Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism should be just as subject to criticism as are conservatism and liberalism.
However, the only religion about which criticism is ipso facto declared racist and immoral is Islam. People write books, give lectures, and conduct seminars on the falsity, and the alleged danger and absurdity, of Christian claims and about the immoral record of Christianity. No one attacks them for racism or bigotry, let alone attacks them physically. The B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a report in 1994, The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America, declaring conservative Christians the most dangerous large group in America, in part because of their desire to Christianize America. Yet no one charged the ADL with racism or Christianophobia. However, anyone who argues that Muslims would like to Islamicize Europe or America is labeled an Islamophobe.
But there is no term for the fear of, let alone the loathing of, Christianity. Why not? Why is there Islamophobia but no Christianophobia or Americaphobia? If an artist places a crucifix in a jar of his urine, it is art. Howard Zinn, who devoted his life’s work to portraying America as a largely vile society, became the bestselling American history author of his time. But if a person suggests that Islam has not appeared to be compatible with democracy or that the Islamic treatment of women is inferior to the West’s, he is labeled a racist and Islamophobe.
One might counter that maligning people for criticism is not only true of those who criticize Islam; it is also true of critics of Israel and of America—the former, it is said, are labeled “anti-Semitic” and the latter “unpatriotic.” Neither is true, however. No normative group or individual, conservative or otherwise, labels anyone anti-Semitic for merely criticizing Israel. People are sometimes labeled anti-Semitic for attempting to delegitimize Israel, thereby siding with those who wish to annihilate the Jewish state. And no one in any responsible capacity has called anyone “unpatriotic” just for criticizing America. Hillary Clinton claimed during a Democratic presidential debate that under President George W. Bush, the Defense Department called her “unpatriotic” for asking whether it has a plan to withdraw American troops from Iraq. There was no truth to the charge.
The term Islamophobic has one purpose—to suppress any criticism, no matter how responsible, of Islam.
10. There Is No Difference Between Fundamentalist Muslims and Fundamentalist Christians
FINALLY, IT IS ARGUED (by the Left and by Islamist defense agencies) that there are fanatics in all religions and that there is no difference among them, especially between Christian and Muslim fundamentalists.
According to Karen Armstrong, “Christian fundamentalists in the United States have committed fewer acts of terror than the others for two main reasons: they live in a more peaceful society…[and they] believe that the democratic federal government of the United States will collapse without their needing to take action: God will see to it.”8 Like Muslim fundamentalists, “American Christian fundamentalists are not in favour of democracy.”9
PBS host Tavis Smiley interviewed Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the ex-Muslim Somali writer and activist for human and especially women’s rights in Islamic countries. After mentioning American Muslim terrorist Major Nidal Hasan, who murdered thirteen and injured thirty fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, and Faisal Shahzad, who attempted to murder hundreds in Times Square, this dialogue ensued:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Somehow, the idea got into their [Hasan’s and Shahzad’s] minds that to kill other people is a great thing to do and that they would be rewarded in the hereafter.
Tavis Smiley: But Christians do that every single day in this country.
Ali: Do they blow people up?
Smiley: Yes. Oh, Christians, every day, people walk into post offices, they walk into schools, that’s what Columbine is—I could do this all day long…. There are so many more examples, Ayaan, of Christians who do that than you could ever give me examples of Muslims who have done that inside this country, where you live and work.10
Michel Martin, an NPR host, in discussing whether the Islamic center and mosque planned for near Ground Zero should be moved, compared the Muslim identity of the 9/11 terrorists to the “Christian” identity of American terrorist Timothy McVeigh: “Did anybody move a Christian church after Timothy McVeigh” bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995?11
ABC News 20/20 anchor Chris Cuomo tweeted this to his nearly one million followers: “To all my christian brothers and sisters, especially catholics—before u condemn muslims for violence, remember the crusades…. [S]tudy them.”12
How does a PBS anchor equate Muslims who murder in the name of Islam with American murderers, who, with almost no exceptions, do not commit their murders in the name of Christianity?
How does someone equate the thousands of Islamic terrorists around the world, all of whom are devout Muslims, with one American terrorist who, furthermore, professed no religion?
And how does a news broadcaster assert that, because of the Crusades, Christians cannot condemn Muslims for violence? The Crusades occurred a thousand years ago. One might as well argue that Jews cannot condemn anti-Semitic violence because Jews destroyed Canaanite communities 3,200 years ago. In addition, it is hardly a defense of Islam to have to go back a thousand years to find comparable Christian conduct. And even then there is little moral equivalence. The Crusades were waged in order to recapture lands that had been Christian for centuries until Muslim armies attacked them. (Some Crusaders also massacred whole Jewish communities in Germany on the way to the Holy Land, a grotesque evil that most Church officials condemned at the time.) Bernard Lewis, has written, “The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad—a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war.”13
Two reasons for lumping Christian fundamentalists with Islamists are clear.
First, it is a way to demonize conservative Christians, the Left’s most despised target. That is what Armstrong did in stating that the only reasons Christians don’t commit as many acts of terror as Muslims are that America is a more peaceful society than the societies in which Muslim terrorists live and that America’s Christians don’t have to commit terrorism in order to achieve their goal of bringing down the government. Her third point is that neither fundamentalist Christians nor fundamentalist Muslims believe in democracy.
Not a word of what she said to liken the two groups is true. There is no evidence to back up her charge that fundamentalist Christians do not believe in democracy or wish to bring down the American government. But without naming names or supplying evidence, it sounds persuasive.
Tavis Smiley’s equating of Muslim terrorism with all the criminal killings in America and Michel Martin’s claim that Timothy McVeigh engaged in his act of terror in the name of Christianity are what one regularly hears on liberal television and radio. Normal rules of truth telling are suspended for the greater good of giving conservative Christians a bad name and deflecting moral judgment from the Muslim world.
If truth and morality matter, one cannot make any moral comparison between Islamists and Christian fundamentalists.
The very fact that anyone living among Christians feels perfectly secure in attacking fundamentalist Christians and mainstream Christianity shows there is no comparison. No one feels secure in criticizing Islam. In most Muslim countries, it is a death warrant. Even in the West it is highly dangerous. That is why ex-Muslim critics of Islam or Islamists—such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali woman who works for Muslim women’s human rights—usually travel with bodyguards. And others, such as the brilliant ex-Muslim author “Ibn Warraq,” write under a pen name.
Another telling difference between Christian and Muslim fundamentalists was pointed out by a Christian postal worker who called in to my radio show after I related two news stories:
One news item from the UK and Australia told of some fundamentalist Muslim taxi drivers who refused to pick up passengers who had a dog with them—even when the passenger was blind and the dog was a Seeing Eye dog—because many Muslims believe that Islam forbids them to come into contact with dogs.14 The other news story was related. Many Muslim taxi drivers in Minneapolis, who make up a significant percentage of taxi drivers in that city, refuse to pick up passengers who have a bottle of wine or other alcoholic beverage with them because of the Muslim ban on drinking alcohol.15
The Christian mailman from Denver called in to say that despite his profound religious objections to pornography, he could not imagine objecting to delivering even the raunchiest pornographic journals to homes that ordered it.
This was highly instructive. Given that fundamentalist Christians object to pornography at least as strongly as fundamentalist Muslims object to dogs (and remember, the former is a religious/moral objection while the latter is only a cultural one), why would the Christian mail carrier deliver pornographic material and the Muslim taxi driver refuse a passenger with a dog or with a can of beer? One reason is that, completely contrary to what Karen Armstrong alleges, religious—yes, fundamentalist—Christians in America believe that liberty is a religious value. As much as God may dislike porn, He cherishes liberty. Second, Christians do not hold non-Christians bound by their religious practices, just as Jews do not hold non-Jews bound to Jewish religious law (it is difficult to believe that any Orthodox Jewish taxi driver in America would refuse to drive a passenger who was eating a ham sandwich).
Let us put it this way: One could only wish that fundamentalist Christians and Islamists were morally comparable. If Muslim fundamentalists had the same values, the same commitment to liberty, democracy, and secular government that America’s fundamentalist Christians have, the world would be a far less violent place.
Moderate Muslims—Islam’s and the World’s Hope
THERE ARE TRULY MODERATE religious Muslims, as opposed to many of those declared “moderate” by naive Westerners. They are religious Muslims who wish to see Islamists condemned and Islam reformed. These courageous individuals offer real hope that the Islamic world can one day make significant moral contributions to humanity.
These Muslims can be identified in the following ways, none of which necessitates rejecting a belief in the divinity of the Koran, the revelation to Muhammad, or belief in Islam as the final revelation:
Examples of such Muslim moderates include the aforementioned professor, Muqtedar Khan.
Regarding America, Khan has written, “American Muslims really have no reason to feel they are victims of anything.” The Muslim American community is thriving, proof of “America’s benevolence and tolerance of Islam…”16
And as for the Muslim obsession with Israel, Khan has written: “It is time the leaders of the American Muslim community woke up and realized that there is more to life than competing with the American Jewish lobby for power over US foreign policy. Islam is not about defeating Jews or conquering Jerusalem. It is about mercy, about virtue, about sacrifice and about duty. Above all it is the pursuit of moral perfection.”17
Another moderate is Ahmed al-Rahim, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, who has said: “The most important message is that we condemn all kinds of hate speech including anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism and that we come out as boldly as possible against violence committed by Muslims in Iraq, in Israel…”
In a clear criticism of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and similar Muslim rights organizations that perpetuate Islamist thinking, al-Rahim wrote: “There was more concern with hate crimes against Muslims, which I think were relatively low, and there was more focus on that than actually looking at the violence and the hate speech that has been committed in the name of Islam.”18
Zainab al-Suwaij, executive director of the American Islamic Congress, is another moderate. A religious Muslim and refugee from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, she publicly declared that America “has given Iraqis the most precious gift any nation has ever given another—the gift of democracy and the freedom to determine its own future.”
One more Muslim American who is a source of hope regarding Islam’s future is Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a physician in Arizona whose parents fled Syria in the 1960s. He is the founder and chairman of the board of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. A believing and practicing Muslim, Dr. Jasser advocates American values, and promotes traditional Islam, but one that is never imposed on others. He is particularly courageous in confronting the victimhood-embracing Muslim groups that the mainstream media in the Western world have promoted as the spokesmen for Western Muslims.
THIS CHAPTER ON ISLAM NOTWITHSTANDING, I am confident, almost to the point of certainty, that one day Islam will undergo major changes, as have Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and other world religions. These changes may begin to take place in the lifetime of young people today; they may begin much later than that. But even now there are voices of believing Muslims arguing for an Islam that affirms liberty and human rights, and that eschews theocracy.
They are rare. But given the power of communication, they can be heard.
And when that time comes, Islam may well present a moral expression of the American value system. The purpose of this chapter was to make it clear that that day is not today.
And should that day come, it will likely be the Muslims of America who lead the way—because they will have benefited from and assimilated into Islam the American value system. In the words of Professor al-Rahim, the Muslim community in America is “one of the few communities, if not one of the only communities, that can occupy this place of leading the Muslim world. If you look at European Muslims, they are living in ghettoes. If you look at the Muslim world, there is very little freedom of expression. America has really given Muslims an opportunity to rethink and redefine their position in the world. If it’s going to happen anywhere, it’s going to happen here.”
And that is the point of this book. If the world is going to get better, it will happen thanks to America and its values.