Odd couple: liberals and Islam
It’s a strange refrain coming from the secular liberals, but they’re insistent about it. Islam, they keep saying, is a religion peace.
They say so while wagging a scolding finger in the face of any who are visited by doubts when explosives detonate, gunfire erupts or knives lop off heads in behalf of Allah.
Most Muslims indeed surely are of peaceful disposition. But Islam itself? Seems at least debatable.
But what is there about it exactly that motivates secular circles to single it out as a religion distinguished by its supposed affinity for peace given the violent activities in its name which frequently lead the newscasts?
You don’t hear the secular progressives venturing such generous assessments of, say, the Zionists and Crusaders — especially not the evangelical branch of the latter. The progressives keep an alert eye fixed on the apparently sinister agenda of this duo.
Not infrequently, you hear progressives go beyond the religion-of-peace mantra. They speak in swooning language of the sublime insights of Islam’s holy book, the Koran. You never hear such boffo reviews from them of the Old Testament, that’s for sure.
Are they spoofing us, the secular progressive community? They tend, on the whole, to equate things spiritual with things of a superstitious nature — with astrology or necromancy.
Have the secularist liberals (possibly a redundant term) actually ever read the Koran?
Or are they b.s.-ing us when they gush about its sublimity?
C’mon now. Isn’t the truth likely that they’ve come no closer to reading the book they praise than they have to perusing all seven volumes of “Remembrances of Things Past” — the most popular neverread literary work in all of academia?
Accepting an invitation from CAIR (the Council on American Islamic Relations) to check out the Koran as an antidote to Islamophobia, we slogged through the book from cover to cover. (Never made it through “Remembrances of things Past” but did get through the Koran.)
The experience left us wondering just what therein could possibly appeal to the secular dispositions of the high-minded progressive cohort.
Two themes that leap out from the pages of the Koran are ones that you’d expect to be off-putting in the extreme to those of liberal bent. The first is the non-inclusiveness of the message. The second is the hard-line punitive reprisals promised for the excluded — the Infidels.
Aren’t liberals forever sanctimoniously harping on the moral imperative of diversity?
Of tolerance? On the futility of harsh punitive measures?
Yet the Koran lays out — not altogether unlike other faiths, only perhaps more so — an accept-it-or-else program of belief. It’s Allah’s way or the highway.
The “or else” part is stressed throughout, with the repetitive warning that any who decline to go along with the program face “a mighty chastisement” or “a painful chastisement.” And not merely in this life but in the hereafter as well.
Apart from Islam’s nobones-about-it hostility toward gays and not exactly Gloria Steinem-ish view of women’s place in society, these authoritarian attitudes hardly seem like the notions that would have much appeal among the progressive milieu.
Religion of peace? Let us then avert our gaze from passages such as 9:14: “Fight them (unbelievers) and Allah will punish them by your hands and will disgrace them and give you victory over them .... They shall be slaughtered, or crucified, or their hands and feet shall alternately be struck off.” And — and — “a mighty chastisement” awaits them in the world beyond, too.
Yes, you can find such nasty stuff among the passages of, say, the Old Testament. But Jews and Christians in large numbers ignore the words as not applicable to today’s world. There’s not remotely any Christian or Jewish counterparts to al Qaida, ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas and myriad other extremist outfits that declare themselves Islamic.
Even the Westboro “Baptist” cretin “Christians” put limitations on their truculence.
They view American military deaths as the work of an indiscriminately vengeful deity who’s irate over homosexuality. Yet even the tiny Westboro band is willing to leave the dirty work to the Lord.
The Westboros stop short of organizing violent activities to advance their nutty theological obsessions. They seem willing to let the Lord attend to the reprisals.
Under the Koran’s own terms, however, its truculent passages are not to be skipped over, though thankfully most Muslims do.
The Koran, by its own terms, is an uncreated, divine force, coexistent with Allah. It’s not a compendium of the work of many different authors like the Old and New Testaments. The original Koran remains at Allah’s side to discourage any modern re-interpretive mischief.
The Koran itself decrees (at 6:114) that Allah “has revealed to you the Book which is made plain” — i.e., easy to understand. “And those whom we have given the Book know that it is revealed by your Lord with truth. Therefore you must not be among the disputers.”
And (at 6:115) it is added for good measure that “word of your Lord has been accomplished truly and justly. There is none who can change his words.”
“The Mother of the Book” remains “in Our presence,” says 13:39. And 43:4 underlines the point, declaring that the Koran has existed for all eternity alongside Allah.
Further reinforcing the message is 5:101-2: “O ye who believe. Ask not questions about things which, if made plain to you, may cause you trouble .... Some before you did ask such questions and on that account lost their faith.”
Such curbs on individual inquiry would seem anathema among the progressive set. Yet progressives remain especially solicitous of the concerns of Islam, even as they take an openly snide attitude toward, say, many of the tenets of Catholicism and Protestant evangelicalism.
Such Koranic language impedes the possibility of Islamic reform, “reform” in general being the mostused word in the liberal vocabulary.
Another much-used liberal word is “peace.”
Contrast the Sermon on the Mount’s “Blessed are the peacemakers” with the Koran’s 2:11: Be wary of those who say “We are but peace- makers.” They are “mischief-makers” who “do not perceive.”
Most Muslims resist, or at least ignore, their faith’s exhortations to, for example, “Fight those who do not believe in Allah...until they pay the jizya (Islamic tax on conquered infidels) in acknowledgement of (Islamic) superiority and until the unbelievers are in a state of subjection.” (9:29).
Religion of peace? Surely no more so than other faiths, arguably significantly less so than some other faiths.
Islam was clearly not a religion of peace to Sheik Osama bin Laden, “sheik” being an honorific his followers bestowed on him hailing his knowledge of Islam and devotion to it.
In his famous (or infamous) 1996 “Declaration of War” on Christians and Jews, he quoted copiously — and accurately — from the Koran, elaborating on seven different verses to bolster his case for a violent Islamic agenda. His faith was not merely incidental to his political agenda — more like the other way around.
It’s become a doxology of secular liberalism to assert that ISIS bears absolutely no relationship to Islam, even though the first “I” in ISIS stands for “Islamic.” Princeton University’s Bernard Haykel,
an expert on ISIS’ ideology, dismisses this assertion as politically correct “nonsense.”
“People want to absolve Islam,” he was quoted saying in an Atlantic magazine piece on ISIS (March 2015). “It’s this ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra,” he said.
ISIS fanatics, in fact, know their Koran backwards and forwards, he added, and take inspiration and guidance from its contents.
Ayatollah Khomeini, founding father of the Islamic Republic of Iran, is another expert on Islam who argues heatedly that Islam is not — repeat, NOT — a religion of peace.
“Ayatollah” to Shi’a Muslims is the highest rank in recognition of Islamic learning and piety.
“Ayatollah” means “signifies Allah.” Here’s what the Ayatollah said about protestations that Islam is at its heart a religion of peace:
“There are hundreds of Koranic psalms and hadiths urging Muslims to value war and to
fight. Does all this mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon the foolish souls who make such a claim.”