Progressives and Islam: strange bedfellows
It’s one of the strangest relationships in politics: progressives and Islam. They have nothing in common yet are best buddies. Go figure.
Progressives are predisposed to secularism, if not agnosticism or atheism. They have little patience for the fervency of Pentecostals or the literalism of Evangelicals.
Yet progressives (or liberals, pick your term) are quick to rally to the defense of Muslims, even though Muslims are inclined toward both fervent religious belief and literalism.
A Pew Research Foundation poll found that only about six in 10 Catholics and Protestants, and not even four in 10 Jews, are sure there really is a god. But nearly 9 of 10 U.S. Muslims are absolutely sure of it.
Fundamentalist Christianity — which gives progressives the creeps — views its scripture as inspired by God. But Islam goes further yet. It views its scripture, the Koran, as the direct, literal message — verbatim — that Allah passed on toMuhammed through the angel Gabriel.
Progressives mock the “holy rollers” and “Elmer Gantries” of Christianity but mobilize at the slightest criticism of Islam, denouncing it as “Islamophobia.” Go figure.
Yet women and gays, two constituencies whose interests progressives tirelessly champion, have fared far worse under Islam than under conservative governors and presidents.
Not even Vice President Mike Pence insists that women be required by law or social pressure to wear head-to-toe burqas and niqabs. Or that they be banned from driving or appearing in public without a male escort. Or that adulteresses be stoned to death. (Nearly nine of 10 Pakistanis and Egyptians favor doing so, according to a Pew survey.) Nor has Pence called for the death penalty for gays, as 10 Muslim nations do. (Other Muslim nations are willing to settle for harsh prison terms and/or merciless thrashings.)
Progressives sermonize relentlessly on the subject of tolerance, chastising others for lacking it. Homophobia runs neckand-neck with Islamophobia in the progressive catechism of worrisome sin.
Yet the Pew Research Foundation’s surveys find little tolerance of gays in Islamic jurisdictions. While 60 percent of Americans now view consenting adult homosexual relations as acceptable, a scant 9 percent in Turkey do. Tolerance for gays is even harder to find elsewhere in the Muslim world — only 4 percent in the Palestinian territories, 3 percent in Egypt and 2 percent in Pakistan.
Speaking of the subject of tolerance, the Pew surveys show 50 percent in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Islamic country, favoring the imposition of Sharia (Islamic law) on nonMuslims. Fully three-quarters in Egypt favor enforcing Islamic beliefs by government decree on non-Muslims.
Go figure further. Progressives are squeamish when it comes to the death penalty. They blanch at the thought of executions, even in cases like Charles Manson’s.
Islamic jurisdictions, however, are untroubled by such qualms.
Aside from the enthusiastic support for stoning adulteresses to death, there’s landslide support in Islamic countries for capital punishment for any who leave Islamfor another faith.
According to the Pew surveys, 66 percent in the Palestinian territories count themselves in this camp.
Elsewhere there’s even greater enthusiasm for the execution of apostates. Fully 76 percent favor it in Pakistan, 86 percent in Egypt.
Progressives embrace “reform” as their watchword — but not necessarily when the word is applied to Islam.
Again, go figure.
The progressive Southern Poverty Law Center denounced Maajid Nawaz, a Muslim himself who seeks to reform his faith, as a hate-mongering Islamophobe. (The SPLC had to pay Nawaz $3.37 million in libel damages for having done so.)
Yet progressive apologists do not hesitate to come forward with sophistries minimizing the rigidly severe doctrines of Islam.
The term “Islamofascist” has long stalked Islam. It dates back to the days when theMufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin alHusseini, one of the world’s topranking Islamic figures, notoriously allied himself and his Palestinian cause with Hitler.
Beyond that connection, “Islamofascism” signifies the mindset that Islam is destined to triumph over and supplant all other faiths, and that Muslims are obligated to dedicate themselves to seeing that this destiny is fulfilled.
There are those who insist, however, that Muslims of such views are “theologically ignorant” of their own faith. One who says so is Garry Wills, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, political commentator and classical-studies academic.
In other words, he faults such Muslims for not believing what he believes they ought to believe, according to the tenets of their own faith. Wills himself is a Catholic. But he’s not shy about offering Muslims his patronizing spiritual counsel, having authored a book entitled “What the Koran Meant.”
The Koran, he declares, contains “a mountain of evidence” that Islam “favors peace over violence.”
Well, maybe so, in his view. But not necessarily in the view of many millions of other Muslims worldwide. They persist in gleaning the very opposite message from the book.
Another academic, Oxford-educated Bernard Haykel (now at Princeton), an expert on the ideology of ISIS, says militant Islamists in fact are hardly ignorant of their own faith. He finds them well-versed in the doctrines of Islam.
It’s nothing unusual to hear militants quoting from memory whole passages of the Koran. Osama bin
Laden regularly launched into lengthy disquisitions on the Koran and various other Islamic tracts.
Haykel does not make a case that Islam’s tenets predispose it to violence. He does, though, make this point: Others may not