Provocations: How Islam is its own worst enemy
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s strong-arm and increasingly militant Islamic president, complains, after the barbaric New Zealand mosque massacres, that hostility toward Islam is on the rise.
He may be right. He might therefore do well to ponder Islam’s own contributions in stoking the fires of hostility toward itself.
Not, mind you, that this excuses, or in any way mitigates, the evil acts in New Zealand. Anything less than the death penalty for the perpetrator will fall emotionally short of a satisfying a sense of justice.
Let’s acknowledge at the outset that all religions, Christianity not least, have at times promoted exclusionary, triumphalist dogma, views hardly calculated to encourage toleration and brotherly love.
Further, let’s stipulate that religions of all varieties have erected hothouses of intolerance by encouraging a habit of mind that speaks of the unknown and unknowable with an absolute certainty.
As for the New Zealand killer, it’s a grotesque irony that he complained of an Islamic “invasion,” even as he staged an invasion of his own, a literal invasion of places of worship.
But there is irony, too, in President Erdogan’s complaint of rising hostility toward Islam. No religion can boast of having an entirely pacifistic record, and Islam maybe least of all.
Turkey’s ancestral “Supreme Ottoman State,” from the 14th to the 20th Century, amassed by force one of history’s most overbearing empires. It was an empire that imposed Islam by the sword, from Northern Africa to Southeastern Europe to Western Asia. And Turkey’s president seems to harbor nostalgic yearnings for the halcyon days of Islamic history when the Crescent and Star fluttered at the head of advancing armies.
Yes, the cross, too, has been hoisted at the spearhead of military expeditions undertaken, incongruously, in the name of Jesus, the Prince of Peace. The point is that Islam is deeply imbued with a militaristic dogma and history, certainly as much as Christianity and arguably more so.
And this dogma and history make it more than a little problematic for Islam today to cast itself in the role of put-upon victim of intolerance — as, for example, the Council on American Islamic Relations persists in doing.
It is typically overlooked by kumbaya-crooning progressives that Islam, aside from the Ottoman Empire, made its conversions largely by military conquest. In many nations today Islam maintains its dominant status by raw, unsubtle coercion.
Islam won over “converts” at sword’s point, first across Northern Africa, east to west, from the Arabian peninsula to Morocco, then across Spain and Portugal and ultimately into Western Europe, all the way to modern-day France and Austria, before resistance finally halted this tidal wave of Islamic conquest.
Those conquests ultimately provoked the Crusades. The Crusades nowadays are characterized, in secular progressive as well as Muslim circles, as simply an eruption of Islamophobic Christian yahooism.
But excessive though they surely were, the Crusades were in fact a reactive movement. They were aimed at taking back turf lost to Islamic conquest. Which is why the Spaniards’ word for the Crusades was, and is to this day, “the Reconquista” — i.e., the Reconquest.
Recent as well as distant history surely accounts in a major way for the mistrust and hostility Islam engenders toward itself.
Militantly pious, cutthroat groups like al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, Al-Shabab, Boko Haram and others have hardly been goodwill ambassadors for the faith.
And such groups can hardly be dismissed as mere outliers. They command far more numerous adherents, far more supportive financing, far more threatening armaments and far more disciplined organization than, say, scraggly white supremacist groups do. And they find justification for themselves in the literal words of the Koran.
The Klan and its kindred cretins have never come close to being capable of pulling off a 9/11, as al-Qaeda did, nor have they ever come close to being capable of militarily seizing control swaths of territory encompassing a population of 10 million, as ISIS did at its peak.
Further promoting hostility toward Islam today are nations such as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
They are quarreling, repressive, backward power centers of Islam.
They have institutionalized pro-Islamic religious intolerance on an unabashed, ferocious scale. Try holding a Christian church service in Mecca or Tehran or opening a Jewish synagogue or a Buddhist temple there.
If Islam expects non-Islamic people to have a more favorable attitude toward the faith, it needs to take such glaring realities under more serious advisement.
And it needs, further, to take into account the role that Islam’s flagrantly belligerent rhetoric, itself, plays in advancing mistrust of the faith.
Al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban and other adherents that favor shoving Islam down the throats of “infidels” certainly may be faulted for intolerance. But they can’t accurately be faulted for promoting views contrary to core teachings of the Koran.
This is an unsettling truth, and it is a truth that won’t be
banished by wishful thinking, blind denial or diversionary libels of “Islamophobia.”
Christian and Jewish scriptures, it’s true, contain plenty of narratives of their own that, if taken literally, can be used to justify all sorts of petty hatreds, cruelties and violence. But the two faiths largely (though not entirely) succeeded long ago in leaving such nasty attitudes behind.
Not Islam, however. And the reason, unfortunately, is built right into the faith’s scripture.
You often hear our highminded liberal academics praise the Koran for its sublime beauty and poetry. But it they actually bothered to read it, they surely wouldn’t be enticed by the themes it stresses.
It is, from beginning to end, pretty much a rant against other faiths, especially, in highly rancorous language, Judaism. It consists of page upon page of tirades against “disbelievers,” “unbelievers” and other holdouts against Allah.
The holdouts are characterized as “fools,” as “deceivers,” as “diseased,” as “ignorant,” as “cursed,” as “idolaters,” as the progeny of “fallen angels,” as demonic “shaitans” — as people generally of satanic ill will.
The Koran is no manifesto for diversity. Au contraire. It states that non-Muslims had their fair chance to accept the word from Allah and blew the opportunity.
Additional page upon page of the Koran, therefore, anticipates with relish the hellfire and other unmerciful retribution that will be the lot of non-Muslims come Judgment Day.
Speaking of those who decline to submit to Islam, the Koran declares (at sura or chapter 2.7):
“Allah has set a seal upon their hearts and upon their hearing, and there is a covering over their eyes, and there is a great punishment awaiting them.” Not exactly a sentiment that rings of peace on earth, good will toward men. Not, you’d think, the sort of stuff virtue-signaling, diversity-espousing liberals normally would be inclined to excuse as constituting a “religion of peace.”
Fortunately, most Muslims, especially in America, ignore their faith’s call to take up arms against the kafir — the faith’s insulting n-word equivalent for non-Muslims — just as most Christians and Jews now ignore their faith’s exhortations to weed out sorcerers and homosexuals.
The Koran itself looms as the single largest obstacle to Islamic reform efforts, efforts that might otherwise minimize hostility toward the faith.
The Koran holds itself to be the literal, infallible and immutable word of Allah. Its contents are not biblical yarns assembled over the ages. They’re the words straight from Allah’s mouth to the Muslim ears.
The Koran goes to great lengths to make the point. It warns against any modernizing interpretations of the text whatsoever.
Allah is said to keep the original Koran at His side to discourage just such tampering with the text.
And woe unto any who do dare to reinterpret Allah’s words, says the Koran. Any “who believe in one part the Book and disbelieve in another” are doomed to a “most grievous” punishment. (See 2.85.)
Would-be “rejecters,” “disputers” and “doubters” are warned away from reform efforts on the ground that the Koran perfectly sets forth “truth with certainty.” All are obligated to accept the Koran’s truth exactly as it is written. (2.147, 69.49, 69.52.)
Sura 3.7 further admonishes reformers who attempt to smooth the jagged edges of the Koran or to downplay them: “None knows the Book’s interpretations except Allah, and those who are firmly rooted in knowledge say, ‘We believe in it, it is from our Lord.”
Elsewhere (at 5:101), believers are warned not to question that which the
Koran makes “plain to you.” 6:45 adds: “None can change His words for He is the One who knoweth and heareth all.”
You can plainly see, then, what would-be modernizers of Islam are up against. Religious reformers of all faiths have always had a hard go of it, especially where religion allied itself with government.
But surely none has a harder go of it than the would-be reformers of Islam.
Way back in the 8th-10th centuries, Islamic reformers known as the Mu’tazilites actually secured a foothold here and there, including, of all places, Baghdad. They maintained that rather than blindly adhere to the literal word of the Koran, Muslims were obligated to use the powers of reasoning God gave them.
Eventually the Mu’tazilites provoked powerful establishment forces into launching their own version of Christianity’s Inquisition — the Mihna.
The Mu’tazilite reform movement was crushed by dungeon and torture. The word Mu’tazilite itself became a term of condemnation, a synonym for labelling someone a despised heretic. The word stands to this day as a powerful precedent obstructing reform.